The Arndale Centre - Manchester

"Behold the ingenuities of civic pride: ugly we may be, but our ugly's bigger than yours" - Howard Jacobson

The Arndale Centre (more commonly The Arndale) is a large shopping mall at the heart of Manchester. With it's size it is the largest shopping mall in Europe. In 1996, when the IRA detonated a bomb in the heart of Manchester, The Arndale also had damages. It's famous skyway to the Marks And Spencer store was destroyed with the M&S store as well. Later it was reopened and now serves the community with it's shops.
First of all, there is everything and nothing in The Arndale. We did not buy too much there, but we did spend a lot of time there. The Arndale is simply huge. It does not fully describe it. There are tons of shops, but we still could not get, what we wanted. Your chance of finding what you want is slim, since you have to know what you want to buy, and be quite specific, as you are unable to cover such a big area in a few hours.
The most remarkable place in The Arndale is the Media Store. At Hungary most shops like this are now closed. I think that is due to the agressive pricing and the fees that we pay for each disc to the organisations that "protect" the interests of authors by enforcing their precious Copyright Laws. That alone lead us to the point when we cannot even buy any discs, even if we want to. I would not call Media Markt a nice example for a media store.
The Arndale Media Store had many offers. One of the most remarkeable offers was the one stating for 4 films for 20£. The offer was combinable, so you did not have to take 4 preselected films, instead you had at least one hundred films to select from. The only thing we bought there were 3 music CDs for Andi. She enjoys them much. You do, don't you honey?