If you were to gaze up on Deansgate, you’d feel dizzy.
You can be dazzled at the pace of change in Manchester. It’s well documented how tall the city is growing, with plans to cross the 70-storey threshold in the works, but it’s on the ground too.
Roads - like Deansgate - are becoming car-free. Waterways are being cleaned up to make them pedestrian motorways and to link leisure spaces together.
READ MORE: Enjoy a stroll and some window shopping on Manchester's King Street in the 1980s
None of this should come as too much of a surprise, with every city in the country changing, growing, and adapting as time goes by. But, this week, a late-night internet wormhole made me realise how much the city has changed in the last 15 years.
Why the last 15 years? Because 2007 is when Google launched Streetview, the wonderful tool to see what roads actually look like. A lot of Manchester started being photographed by 360-degree cameras in 2008, and now it’s much easier to see how much the city has changed.
On my late-night-insomnia-Streetview-odyssey, I started in Ancoats - Manchester’s poster-child of urban renewal/gentrification (delete as appropriate).
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered to myself when I dragged the timeline slider back to July 2008. I had just gone from seeing New Islington Marina — which is now home of the oat milk latte-sipping, sausage dog owning rented gentry - regress back to miles of overcast wasteland. The only recognisable landmark was the medical centre which kick-started it all.
Next, I clicked my way down to The Bridgewater Hall, and Manchester Central. Those two, plus Beetham Tower, have been constants on Streetview, although the latter was less than two years old when the first images were captured.
But it’s everything else that’s rocketed up. Deansgate Square, plus the soon-to-be Blade and Three60 buildings. The Tower of Light. The Peterloo Memorial.
It didn’t stop there. I nipped over the Irwell, into Salford, to see how much Chapel Street had changed. It’s gone from wasteland and crumbling buildings to one of Greater Manchester’s busiest and most vibrant roads. I don’t think any of the folks who stopped to look at the Streetview car on that summer’s day in 2008 could imagine the rate of change just 13 years on.
That being said, a lot was the same. Piccadilly Gardens looked eminently recognisable, as did St Ann’s Square, and Market Street. I think I could even navigate St Peter’s Square, complete with Mosely Street running through it and white trams, as it was in 2008.
So it seems like where Manchester has changed, it has changed a lot. But in other places, things have changed as fast as they’ve stayed the same.
That is the message of this weekend’s Unwind. Our lives can change beyond recognition in some aspects, and stay identical in others.
That’s the beauty of the passage of time, in some ways - so why not use this weekend to take stock of where you were in 2008?
Welcome to the weekend, everyone. Here are three stories to get your brain in gear before you ponder the last 15 years.
The billionaire who snapped up The Midland is eyeing up more of Manchester
One Mancunian sight that’s stayed similar over the years is the Midland Hotel. The Edwardian masterpiece stands proud, overlooking St Peter’s Square.
It’s well-known here, but its owner is anything but a household name, writes Jon Robinson. David Fattal snapped up the hotel in 2018, and wants more of Manchester, even with the Leonardo Hotels on Great Ancoats Street and Great Bridgewater Street under his belt.
"It's a hotel that I have a great affection for so when we had the opportunity to acquire it I was very keen to do so," Jason Carruthers, who heads up Leonardo Hotels in the UK, told Jon.
"It's a period property and it's nearly 120 years old so it constantly needs upkeep on things like the façade and the windows", he went on. “We're always working through a planned maintenance programme for the hotel anyway.”
In an insightful interview, he’s explained where Leonardo might go next — and what it means for the city.
'I finally told my boss I couldn't read and write. Now I'm Queen of Crime'
This week, Karen Woods has shown us all how to overcome adversity and do the best we can.
She’s been speaking to Paige Oldfield about how she went from an illiterate cleaner to a novelist. It’s remarkable.
“When I used to work as a cleaner and got the promotion, I lost loads of sleep thinking they would find out I couldn’t read or write,” Karen, from Miles Platting, said.
“I thought I could blag my way around it, but they sent me on an Adult Literacy Course and as the lessons went on I started to take an interest. Once I got the certificate in my hand I realised anything was possible – I could read and write and was the same as everyone else.
“Nothing is set in stone if you believe in yourself. I'm on my 27th novel now and my dream hasn’t stopped there.”
You can read the full uplifting story here.
There's only two of these in the country - and Manchester has one of them
As well as travelling around Manchester’s street virtually this week, I’ve been out to one of the rarest post boxes on British shores. It’s blue - for a special reason.
The Liverpool Road post box is a commemoration of the air mail service which ran from 1930-38, before being subsumed into the main Royal Mail sorting system. Robert Cole, from the Letter Box Study Group, explained why blue post boxes came about.
“The post office set up letter boxes in 1862 but in the 1920s this exciting thing came around called an aeroplane,” he said. “They were able to charge more for air mail, so it was an opportunity really.
"They put up special boxes and had special vans that were sky blue and a huge advertising campaign from that time. It was like adverts today for super-fast broadband. It was not that all new post boxes were blue, just some of them in city centre sites and they were special.”
But by the dawn of the Second World War, air mail boxes were out. You can find out more here.
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Enjoy a stroll and some window shopping on Manchester's King Street in the 1980s
