Oh Manchester, so much that Pevsner saw

I was reading a blogpost last week by an American visitor to the Marble Arch, the classic pub on the Ancoats/Collyhurst border a few hundred yards up Rochdale Road from Manchester city centre, and noticed a reference to a description of it in the Pevsner Guide to the Architecture of Manchester ("unusual jack-arch ceiling with exposed cast-iron beams supported by tile-clad brackets. Walls and ceiling of the main bar are lined with glazed bricks and tiles and a lettered frieze advertises types of drink") published in 2001.

I've got the South Lancashire volume of Pevsner's The Buildings of England that covers Manchester, which he wrote after a visit here in 1967 and published in 1969, but didn't realise that the series had continued after his death in 1983. I've just picked up a cheap second hand copy of the Manchester guide online.

There are a few other pubs in the book, including the Britons Protection ("early C19 revamped in the 1930s, with much interior decoration"), Circus ("an almost miraculous survival considering the tiny scale of it") and Hare and Hounds ("late C18 origins with a remarkably complete interwar interior"), but the main interest is in how the city is described in that period, between the opening of what is now the Manchester Central conference centre in 1986, the 1990 Strangeways prison riot which destroyed much of the Victorian gaol just north of the city centre (next to the tower of Boddingtons Brewery that survived until 2007), the coming of the Metrolink tram system in 1992 and the 1996 IRA bomb, which triggered much of the redevelopment of the centre, and the rampant skyscraper building which has transformed it in the last decade, including an artist's impression of what the new Piccadilly Gardens with its now much criticised wall would eventually look like.