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Shortly before 4pm on Thursday (November 20), Manchester council approved a plan to build 498 homes on the ‘former Riverpark Trading Estate’.

Sandwiched between Newton Heath and The Etihad complex, the industrial estate is better known by another name locally: “The Abs.”

It’s a reference to the 20-sided building once at its heart, purpose built in the sixties but rendered obsolete a little over 30 years later. It was a building which could have formed part of a new shopping centre for east Manchester — but instead housed GMP’s Commonwealth Games operations and became the backdrop for post-apocalyptic TV and film dramas.

As a nickname, ‘The Abs’ masks the complex’s intended purpose. Built by the council in 1968, the building was designed to be Manchester’s ‘comprehensive

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