manchester

mancunians

expats

The grand lady of Hanging Ditch

And, call me strange, but I really miss the dodgy tarot-card dealers and New Age mystics who used to trade, a tad precariously, amid the wooden trestle tables, the endless queue to see Hazel the Psychic, and the smell of the veggie sausages sizzling gently in the greasy spoon café beneath the old trading floor.

These days, the scoff available, along with everything else sold here, has travelled a long, long way upmarket from 20 years ago.

Zinc Bar and Grill and Pizza Express are now the eateries of choice with Triangle customers, following a couple of hours' serious browsing for clothes at Jigsaw and Karen Millen, or choosing cool household items at the Muji store.

It's all very glitzy - but something weird and rather wonderful has also been lost in the process of economic transformation. Still, one should be glad, I suppose, that the building has survived at all.

Long before the IRA did their worst in June, 1996, the Edwardian building was one of the few in the Cannon Street to survive the Manchester Christmas Blitz of 1940.

The current building replaces an earlier version, which opened for trade in Hanging Ditch in 1837. The present Corn Exchange opened in 1903, when, despite its reputation as "Cottonopolis", Manchester was also a distribution centre for foodstuffs and many other raw materials.

By the last two decades of the 19th century, Manchester was attracting thousands of dealers every week to its various food and material exchanges, and the new Corn & Produce Exchange (to give its full name) was designed to handle regional trading in agricultural produce. In its heyday, it was the gathering spot for thousands of traders from all over the region.

That happy state of affairs continued until the great depressions of the 1920s and 1930s.

After the Second World War, there was a gradual decline in business, and the main trading floor fell gradually into disuse.

Demolition

At one stage, there was talk of demolition - but, ironically, the recession which left much of the building empty probably saved it from the bulldozer, as no one was very interested in taking it on.

In the mid-1970s, the Corn Exchange was used briefly by the Royal Exchange Theatre Company as a second home. In 1980, its perfectly preserved Edwardian lifts and staircases served as one of the locations for Granada's award-winning series, Brideshead Revisited.

At around the same time, the New Agers moved in, and for some years the Corn Exchange flourished as the place where you could get everything from Elvis memorabilia to antique clothes, books, military medals - and a full English fry-up. In the early 1990s, there were all kinds of plans for an arts centre and restaurant here, catering for the more Bohemian members of Manchester society.

And then the IRA bomb went off. The damage to the Corn Exchange was pretty devastating. Over 800 roof panels were blasted, the dome was destroyed, and, for the traders who had to move out while the place was repaired, it was the end of the road.

It took four years to re-vamp it, and when the building returned to city life its interior was almost unrecognisable. The Corn Exchange had become The Triangle. It re-opened in August, 2000.

Some £28m was invested in its future by Frogmore Estates, and no one would regret that, or dispute its draw as a shopping Mecca at the end of town once spurned by the fashionable.

The odd medium or astrologer wouldn't half liven things up, though.

Links within ManchesterOnline