Manchester
Manchester City Centre is the main shopping centre for the North West. The prime retailing area is based around the pedestrianised Market Street and one of Europe's largest shopping malls, the Arndale Centre. Most major 'chain stores' are located here. In a recent study, Manchester was found to be the UK's second most popular location for retailers outside London; this is confirmed by the success of the area around Deansgate, King Street, St Ann's Square and the Victorian Barton Arcade, which have brought in top names in high fashion such as Armani, Boss, Vidal Sassoon, Westwood and DKNY.
Affleck's Palace
Afflecks is a revitalised city centre building with five storeys of around 50 stalls and market-type shops, which provides shoppers with a novel buying experience. Very like an Aladdin's Cave, Afflecks has become a platform for fledgling designers, punk, retro style and experimental fashion - a magnet to young shoppers, particularly on Saturdays. Affleck's Palace was opened in 1982, the brainchild of James Walsh, a Manchester-born hairdresser with a keen interest in the fashion industry. Based on the street fashion of the late 1970's and early 1980's he planned to provide affordable retail outlets for emerging designers to sell their wares directly to the public. Prices are generally much lower than you'd expect to pay in more upmarket stores, but with little by way of fancy decor or expensive overheads, these predominantly young entrepreneurs usually offer great value for
Manchester's Chinatown
Chinatown is one of the busiest and most colourful areas of city centre Manchester. Situated just behind Piccadilly Plaza, around George Street and Charlotte Street, off Mosley Street behind the City Art Gallery, the area bustles with life - tradesmen and tourists alike, and is particularly well worth seeing on Sundays, when ethnic Chinese traders from all over the county descend on the area to buy in food supplies from the proliferation of superstores, the herbalists, gift shops, restaurants and markets. There are many other ethnicities represented in Chinatown, including Thai, Malaysian, Singaporean, Nepalese, Italian, French and Japanese shops and restaurants. For the food-seeker, there is a cornucopia of restaurants to choose from, both Cantonese and Pekingese, as well as other oriental restaurants.
Arndale Centre
Located in the heart of the city, Manchester's Arndale Centre in many ways dominates the central shopping area of the City. Begun in 1972, by its completion in 1979 it was the largest covered town shopping centre in Europe, covering some 30 acres in the old city centre, with 750,000 shoppers visiting it each week. With over 200 shops, major department stores, restaurants an fast food outlets it has become a busy and active shopping arcade. The centre houses an 1800 space multi-storey car park, shopping malls on two levels, office space in tower, residential flats, and the Arndale Centre Bus Station at Cannon Street.
The Trafford Centre
Opened in September 1998, this enormous new shopping and leisure complex has already been designated the "Temple to Consumerism", and is the largest centre of its kind to date in Europe. Although it contains all the major high street department stores and chains - (Debenhams, Boots Chemists, Burtons, The Body Shop, Dorothy Perkins, W.H.Smith, Top Shop, British Home Stores, etc), it is much more than a shopping centre. Its gigantic dining hall, "The Orient", has innumerable fast food franchises and restaurants, (including a speciality Chinese street), in a dramatically theatrical ocean liner setting with swimming pool and performance stage with a large film/TV screen.
The Trafford Centre is a mammoth undertaking. It covers an area equal to 30 football fields, has onsite free parking for 10,000 cars and 300 coaches, there are 350 closed circuit TVs in operation, its malls have over 3 miles of covered walkways, use 19 miles of drainage, and its roof bears around 2 tons of water a second in rainy weather. It produces 400 tons of waste packaging every week and uses enough electricity to power a small town.
There are excellent facilities for the disabled, with a dedicated 65 space car park with "Shopmobility" facilities onsite. These include electric wheelchairs. All entrances, lifts and escalators are designed for wheelchair access. There are also facilities for the visually impaired, with special lenses available at the Customer Services Desk and the Shopmobility Unit. Mothers and babies are equally well catered, with specialist baby changing and breast feeding rooms, disposable nappy dispensers, and a milk bottle heating facility in the Orient.
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