Recently I had an hour spare in Manchester and decided to visit the building where I worked for five years as an apprentice way back in 1965. I had fond memories of Percy’s, as well as a couple of traumas best forgotten and walked down Whitworth Street and then Whitworth Street West. What I saw saddened me immensely. Although the Hotspur Press building had never been pretty, it represented one of the first industrial mills in Manchester and was prominently positioned on the banks of the Medlock, looking out towards Oxford Road. It closed as a commercial printers in the early seventies, many of its staff finding work at the Cooperative Press or the fortunate ones, at one of the many thriving national newspapers at the time.
Its present state of dilapidation with security warnings slapped over it and daubed in shades of purple makes me think it will only be a matter of time before it is decided that it can no longer be developed and will be demolished. I used to be naïve enough to think that the lessons of the sixties had been learnt, that we would now cherish our Manchester industrial history and remember with distaste the destruction that led to the Arndale Centre in what had been the heart of the city.