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Affleck's Palace
1988

From City Life student special, Oct. ’88.
Just to show how far Affleck’s Palace had come; a full page glossy on the inside cover of the mag. It had come a long way from the mostly derelict Affleck’s and Brown to a pillar of the anti-establishment.
When it re-opened in it’s early incarnation with it’s 50p shop on the ground floor and a few scraggy stalls, mostly supplied from the likes of the trash and treasure type markets of Ashton, Harpurhey, Wythenshawe and the Mecca of them all, the Wednesday Oldham market, I don’t think anyone thought it would turn into “the Carnaby Street of the North” , as it’s described in one of the other issues. We used to do the 2nd hand markets from time to time and you were bound to espy the odd stallholder stocking up for the coming weeks. Sometimes we used to get up onto the disused levels of the building just to mooch around, as much out of boredom as anything else. I remember climbing down into the disused lift shaft one time and finding an old Makita drill on top of the actual lift so that was a top score! I don’t doubt that some of the flyers I’ve uploaded over the time could well have come off the notice boards on each landing as you went up the stairs to different levels. Before it there wasn’t really to much else like that; the old antique market down behind Deansgate being about the most prominent one.
It seems the whole Afflecks thing mirrored well the change in Manchester’s fortunes, from it’s perceived earlier provincial and post industrial and, at times, pessimistic image , (the one of my youth) ,to its semi- world domination of youth culture in the approaching years. Don’t know how the land lies these days, but you can’t stop progress apparently....
There's a full page add inside for a shop called "Red or Dead" opening in The Royal Exchange; a bit of a juxta-position between its name and its location I would have thought....?Fashion, what do I know......