The Corn Exchange....

The Corn Exchange is a triangular building occupying the site between Manchester Cathedral and Exchange Square. It’s actually three separate buildings, if you study the architecture, that surround a central courtyard that was covered by a huge dome. It’s surrounded by some of the oldest streets in the city, dating back to medieval times. One with the evocative name of Hanging Ditch. In old maps of the town you can clearly see the triangular site of this building.

The present buildings were built in Victorian times as the Corn and Produce Exchange. What is probably the grandest of the buildings faces on to Exchange Square. When it ceased to be that is was used as offices and an exhibition space. By the 1990s it had transformed into the place in Manchester where you went for alternative shopping, full of little stalls selling vintage clothes, old comics, ethnic arts, handmade cosmetics and the like. All that came abruptly to an end in 1996 when the IRA bomb of that year ripped through this building. The little businesses decamped to the nascent N4 and the Corn Exchange was restored and opened as an upmarket shopping destination. Peculiarly, given that the massive Arndale Centre, Selfridges and Harvey Nichols are its immediate neighbours facing onto Exchange Square, it never thrived as such.

That all closed last year and they (whoever ‘they’ are) have spent £30,000,000 refitting the building as a foodie destination. Eating out is big in Manchester. We are the city that came out of the recession with more restaurants then we went in with. Barely a week passes without a new one opening somewhere in the city. And precious few seem to close. It’s all nearing completion now and over the next few weeks, 15 restaurants will open in this building.

Some were busy fitting out their spaces yesterday. Some of the restaurants will have double frontages so people can sit out at pavement tables in warm weather or in the domed courtyard in the bad. And some have the cool, glass covered terraces you can see in the picture.