A Map, a Memory, and 24 Years of Change
This isn’t a particularly old map - it was published in 2002 - but wow, what a change.
It’s a small part of Andrew Taylor’s Manchester City Centre Map, a brilliantly detailed series that began in the 1990s.
What I love is the story behind it. Taylor wasn’t originally a professional map publisher in the usual sense - he was a map enthusiast who started exploring Manchester after moving here in the 1980s. Finding that there wasn’t a detailed city-centre map available, he decided to make one himself.
The early versions were hand-drawn, hand-lettered and hand-coloured, with Taylor walking every street and alleyway to add the details that ordinary base maps often missed - shops, pubs, office blocks, building names and business names.
And that’s what makes these maps so fascinating.
Street layouts are useful. Building outlines are useful. But once you add names, uses and businesses, the city suddenly has personality. It stops being just a map and starts becoming a memory trigger.
For people who have lived in Manchester for years, it brings back places they knew. For people newer to the city, it shows what once stood in their neighbourhood, or where they now live, work, eat, drink or walk past every day.
A few personal memories from this 2002 map of Knott Mill: going to Quay Bar in Castlefield, designed by Roger Stephenson’s practice Stephenson Bell, completed in 1998, shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, and sadly demolished less than a decade later in 2007.
There’s also Key 103 at Castle Quay. The station had begun life as Piccadilly Radio, broadcasting from Piccadilly Plaza in 1974, before Key 103 launched on FM in 1988. By the time of this map, it had moved to Castlefield, into Middle Warehouse, one of the surviving historic Bridgewater Canal warehouses, where barges once entered the building to be unloaded.
And The Pack Horse brings back very fond memories too… it’s where I watched United win the Champions League in 1999. What a night that was. I still vividly remember the huge table getting tipped over, drinks going everywhere, as Solskjær scored the winning goal in injury time and everyone jumped up to celebrate…!
What places do you remember on this map?
Google Map of the Area
Thanks to SimpsonHaugh for the latest masterplan of the Great Jackson Street Development.
Satellite map - photo (taken in 2025): Google Maps
