Report - Manchest Arndale Rooftop/Maintenance Room/TKMaxx Storage (Jan 2012)

[MaybeNot1330]

Me and a friend (robehhh I think he joined as on here) were bored late at night, decided a drive into manchester would be good, we didnt have a plan atall other than deciding we werent going to leave til we got on a rooftop of some sort. We tried a few only to not find access to the building, or climb 24 floors of stairs to find no access, or to be asked to leave by security, who then asked us to wait for his colleague to escort us down, but my hand slipped on the button in the lift and we went down without him!

We got on the roof of the arndale and what a nice rooftop it is, plenty to see up there, with nice views accross manchester. We were in a particular area for around 10 minutes looking round when we found access into ventilation which took us into a maintenance room which had loads of machines and networking gear, I started to take photos in the dark, but had a terrible torch with me so I hunted down the light switch and spent a good amount of time in there, then I went through a door and found myself at the rear of TKMaxx, trollies, shelving units etc belonging to them here, I then go to go into another area which has music playing and a load of IR cameras pointed my way, so I take a quick photo with flash and off we went to explore the rest of the rooftop. In theory I believe we could have made our way to anywhere in the arndale, but at that point I believe I had gone far enough, although im starting to regret it already. There were plenty of cameras all over the place, and this was definatelty one of the cases where the cameras are only as good as the person watching them.

For those few of you who dont know about the arndale

Manchester Arndale (the The Arndale Centre or The Arndale) is a large shopping centre in Manchester, England. The centre was built in the 1970s when many other cities were constructing large malls. Manchester Arndale is the largest of a chain of Arndale Centres built across the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. It was constructed in phases between 1972 and 1979, at a cost of £100 m.[2]

The centre was redeveloped after the 1996 Manchester bombing. The centre has a retail floorspace of just under 1,500,000 sq ft (140,000 m2) (not including Selfridges and Marks and Spencer department stores to which it is connected via a link bridge), making it Europe's largest city-centre shopping mall.[3] It is one of the largest shopping centres in the UK with 38 million visitors annually[4], ahead of the Trafford Centre which attracts 35 million.[5]

Now on to the photos:

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Thanks for reading!