Phill Rawlins Online - Manchester aviation and transport photography

Manchester developments

Five dates, one city: the redevelopment of Trafford Quays, Ancoats and Spinningfields photographed as the work progressed.

The photographs below were taken on five dates through 2002 and 2003 at sites across the city. Click any image for a larger view.

Venus, Trafford Quays

An office block under construction beside the Ship Canal, photographed through 2003.

The Venus office block under construction at Trafford Quays, Manchester
Venus, Trafford Quays. The building under construction, photographed on 17 April 2003. The original page recorded it on four dates — 14 February, 30 March, 17 April and 26 May 2003 — of which only this frame and the sequence notes survive.

About the sequence. This page was built around repeated visits to the same sites, which is what gives it its value: the point was never the finished building, it was the process. Three of the four Venus frames, and the Spinningfields photographs, were not captured by the Internet Archive.

Ancoats

The Express Buildings, from dereliction to redevelopment.

The Express Buildings in Ancoats, Manchester
The Express Buildings, Ancoats. Redeveloped by 2002, with the surrounding streets still to follow. The original page recorded phase two starting in February 2002 and the site changing through August 2002 and May 2003.

Barton Power Station site, Trafford Park

Land under development on the former Barton Power Station site in Trafford Park
The former Barton Power Station site. The original page noted this as a site under development for a new warehouse, on ground that had carried a power station until its demolition in the 1970s.

About this page

This page was photographed on five dates: 14 February, 30 March, 17 April, 26 May and August 2003, together with material from 2002. It is the most deliberate piece of documentation in the archive — the equivalent of standing on the same spot every few weeks for a year.

The surviving photographs are shown above with the dates recorded on the original page. Where a site lost all of its frames, the site is described in text and the page states what is missing, because a development page with invented images would be worthless.

Sites covered originally

  • Venus, Trafford Quays — office block under construction, four dates in 2003.
  • The Express Buildings, Ancoats — 1979 construction, 2002 redevelopment, phase two from February 2002.
  • Spinningfields — recorded in January and May 2003 as a cleared site in the city centre.
  • Barton Power Station site, Trafford Park — land being prepared for a new warehouse development.

What happened next

Spinningfields is now the city’s main business district, and almost nothing standing on it in 2003 survives. Ancoats has been transformed to the point where the derelict streets in these photographs are hard to reconcile with what is there now. Trafford Park has been redeveloped repeatedly, most recently as the site of a major media campus.

The Changing Manchester page follows the same theme, and the aerial photographs show what the skyline looked like while it was happening.