The IRA Bomb

Saturday Morning

Saturday 15 June 1996 was a warm summer morning in Manchester. Euro 96 was underway. England were due to play Scotland at Wembley that afternoon. The city centre was busy with shoppers. The Arndale Centre was packed. Corporation Street, one of the main retail arteries of the city, was doing what it always did on a Saturday morning: selling things to people who had come in from across Greater Manchester for a day out.

The van had been parked on Corporation Street outside Marks and Spencer at about 9:20am. At around 9:40am, Greater Manchester Police received a coded telephone warning. The caller used a recognised IRA codeword. The bomb detonated at 11:17am, giving the police about 97 minutes to evacuate the surrounding area.

What followed was one of the largest peacetime evacuations in British history. GMP officers, many of them on foot, began clearing Corporation Street, the Arndale Centre, Cross Street, Market Street, and the surrounding blocks. They went into shops, offices, pubs, and restaurants and told everyone to leave. Seventy-five thousand people were moved out of the blast zone. It was an extraordinary piece of policing under extreme pressure, carried out by officers who knew they were working next to a bomb and did it anyway.

The Blast

The bomb detonated at 11:17am. It contained approximately 3,300 pounds of explosives, a mixture of fertiliser-based material packed into the van. It was the largest bomb detonated on the British mainland since the Second World War, and one of the largest the IRA ever constructed.

The blast was devastating. It destroyed the front of the Marks and Spencer building on Corporation Street. The Arndale Centre, the largest city-centre shopping centre in Europe, suffered massive structural damage. The Corn Exchange, a Grade II listed Victorian building on Exchange Street, was wrecked. The glass facades of buildings across the city centre were blown out. The blast was heard over fifteen miles away. A mushroom cloud of smoke and debris rose above the city.

212 people were injured, many by flying glass. Remarkably, nobody was killed. The evacuation had saved thousands of lives. If the bomb had detonated without warning on a busy Saturday morning, the death toll would have been catastrophic. The fact that nobody died was entirely down to the speed and professionalism of the evacuation. GMP officers had cleared 75,000 people from the area in under two hours. Several officers were among the injured.

The Damage

The physical damage was immense. An area of approximately 25 acres of the city centre was cordoned off. Over 600 businesses were affected. The estimated cost of the damage was around £700 million, making it one of the most expensive acts of destruction in modern British history. Corporation Street, Cross Street, St Ann's Square, Exchange Square, and the streets around the Arndale were devastated.

The Marks and Spencer building was beyond repair and had to be demolished. The Arndale Centre required years of reconstruction. The Corn Exchange was damaged by the blast; the landlord evicted the traders, and the building reopened as the Triangle shopping centre in 2000 before becoming a restaurant hall with a hotel above in 2015. The Shambles, the medieval cluster of buildings that included the Old Wellington Inn and Sinclairs Oyster Bar, had to be dismantled and moved around 100 metres to their current position in Shambles Square.

The Royal Exchange Theatre, inside the Grade II listed Royal Exchange building on St Ann's Square, was badly damaged. The auditorium, a steel and glass structure suspended inside the old cotton exchange hall, was knocked off its supports. The building took two years to repair and did not reopen until November 1998.

The Rebuild

Manchester's response to the bomb was characteristic. The city did not simply repair the damage. It used the destruction as an opportunity to redesign the city centre on a scale that would never have been politically or financially possible otherwise. The rebuild was not a restoration. It was a reinvention.

An international design competition was held in 1996. The masterplan, developed by EDAW with architects including Ian Simpson, Benoy, and others, reimagined the entire blast zone. Corporation Street was pedestrianised. Exchange Square was created from scratch, replacing the buildings that had been destroyed. The Arndale Centre was given a new facade, replacing the hated 1970s tile cladding with glass and steel. New buildings, new streets, and new public spaces emerged from the rubble.

The Urbis building, a striking glass wedge designed by Ian Simpson, was built on Cathedral Gardens and opened in 2002. It later became the National Football Museum. The Printworks, an entertainment complex built inside a former newspaper printing works on Withy Grove, opened in 2000. Harvey Nichols opened its second store outside London (after Leeds). Manchester went from a city with a tired, run-down centre to one of the most dynamic retail and leisure destinations in the country.

The rebuild took the best part of a decade. It cost over £1.2 billion in total investment, combining public money, private development, and European Union regeneration funding. By the time it was complete, the city centre was unrecognisable from the one that had existed before the bomb. Manchester had taken the worst thing that had ever happened to it and turned it into the best thing that could have happened to it.

The City That Rebuilt Itself

There is no grand memorial to the bombing on Corporation Street. But there is a red post box. The pillar box on Corporation Street survived the blast, battered but intact, and was repaired and returned to its original position. A small plaque on it records what happened. It is the most Manchester memorial imaginable: no statue, no ceremony, just a post box that refused to fall over. The city chose to mark the event not with a monument but with the rebuild itself. The new Manchester, the one with Exchange Square and the glass Arndale and the Urbis and the Printworks, is the memorial. The city's answer to the IRA was not a statue. It was a skyline.

The Old Wellington and Sinclairs Oyster Bar stand in Shambles Square, reassembled timber by timber after being moved from their original position. They are the oldest Tudor timber-framed buildings in the city centre, and they survived the bomb because people took them apart and put them back together again. They still serve pints. They are, in the most Manchester way possible, a quiet act of defiance.

If you walk through Exchange Square today, past the big screen and the fountains and the people eating their lunch on the steps, you are standing in a space that did not exist before 15 June 1996. The ground beneath your feet was Corporation Street. The buildings around you are all post-bomb. The city you are looking at was designed from scratch because someone parked a van full of explosives outside Marks and Spencer on a Saturday morning and Manchester decided that the only acceptable response was to build something better.

Nobody died. The police got everybody out. And then the city got up, dusted itself off, and built the future. That's Manchester.