Manchester’s Lost District: Life before the Arndale Centre

Local writer, Keith Warrender is the author of several books about Cheshire and Manchester and he has just produced ‘Manchester’s Lost District: Life before the Arndale’. It may seem that the Arndale Centre has been dominating the centre of Manchester forever. In fact, the shopping centre was built in the 1970s to replacing a warren of streets, squares and courts, remnants of a much older street network largely unchanged since the 1700s.

Manchester’s ‘Lost District’ was a vibrant business and entertainment area with a mixture of textile warehouses, tailors’ workshops, ancient pubs, music venues, night clubs and coffee bars and the book includes many amazing pictures of the area. Keith took many of these photographs himself in the 50s and 60s before these streets were swept away including one of this second hand book shop in Marsden Square. Marsden Square, described in 1951 as a ‘Georgian backwater’ may have provided Charles Dickens with the inspiration for a London street in ‘Nicholas Nickleby’.