EXPOSED electrical wires loop from the upper ceilings like bizarre Christmas swagging, and an incontinent July sky sends rain pouring through holes in the plaster.

But to the woman in the hard hat, Bolton's Marks & Spencer store is just like home.

Psychologists who maintain that building reconstruction and upheaval, at home or at work, cause stress levels to soar, would be confounded by Sally Martin, a woman plainly in her element with change.

Hertfordshire-born Sally is the development project co-ordinator at the Deansgate store, and her enthusiasm for her work is boundless.

Less than two years into her marriage to Lancashire man Brian, sales director at Euxton's Royal Ordnance establishment, Sally moves between building sites each day, for the couple are converting their own base - two semis on a former poultry farm at Whittingham.

She leaves home, where what remains of the kitchen is in the hall, and arrives in Bolton, where whole departments are on the move.

It is Sally's job to ensure that channels of communication are kept open between staff, customers, management and the builders, Bovis, during the £11 million centralisation of the two Bolton M&S stores.

It is vital that staff, who can find the store changed on a daily basis with stairways appearing and disappearing as by magic, know exactly what to do and where to go in case of a fire alarm - and know how to direct customers too.

Because working conditions are difficult, it is important to keep workers "up to speed" with developments.

Also, to make up a little for the inconvenience they are experiencing, there is the odd treat - like a "strawberry and cream extravaganza".

To further complicate matters, the Bolton operation has taken on 35 "refugee" members of staff displaced by the Manchester bombing and have had to step up an already tight security.

Builders work throughout the night, every night, to complete the extension at Deansgate, and members of the management team must lay on spot checks - which could see Sally turning up on site at 3am to check progress and the builders' safety arrangements. Genuinely excited by the changes taking place, she says the store was "beginning to look an old lady" and the firm had waited for some years before planning regulations would allow the upward move.

Now she predicts: "It is going to be lovely and the major concern is that the place should be acceptable to people with mobility problems, those in wheelchairs and parents pushing baby buggies."

Some of the public perceptions about what is happening on Deansgate are really strange.

One old lady was heard to remark of the protective hoardings that she didn't think much of the "new frontage".

To get the whole thing rolling, Sally and her colleagues did a presentation in London to get over to senior management there the need for and nature of the update and the fact that Bolton was one of the original M & S store sites in 1892 when the "penny bazaar" was a novel thing.

No-one then could foretell how important this branch would be when Manchester suffered at the hands of the IRA.

When finished, the Bolton store will be bigger than the company's present two stores and will be Class 1 - the equivalent of what Manchester was - for ladies' and children's wear and lingerie.

That day is one Sally looks forward to immensely.

On the home front, Brian is going to be the main worker after the builders have finished gutting the houses, and a prime task is to create a room big enough for his grand piano.

As for Sally, she's well pleased. Both home and work conversions are a source of glee to the energetic thirty-something who strides through the unlovely concrete spaces above the Bolton store, but sees only what they will become later this year.

Remark that she obviously enjoys the job and she sounds surprised, asking: "You can tell?"

It isn't hard.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.