The Northern Quarter

“This is the elegant hub of the aspirant club of creatives ordained to fly far, but from where I’m sat it’s less Stella McCartney than fat blokes on Stella Artois”
N/4 by rev porl

As a teenager making my initial forays into the big town, I would always pass by Oldham street and Tib Street for a trip around Affecks Palace and a gander in a couple of the decent record shops along the way. I would marvel at the proliferation of pet shops and tramps, then wander off back to the comfort of the chain stores. When I reached drinking age, and the pet shops turned into sex shops one by one, I discovered that there were also a couple of good pubs around the area, and a couple of the first gigs I saw were at Band on the Wall. But there was never a name for it…

Then, according to the conspiracy theorists, the council hired the IRA to bomb the Corn Exchange, to get the freaks out and the rents up, and for a fast track to some European urban regeneration money. (Mancunian Civic Pride Rule 1:What the Scousers get first, we get more of eventually.) The famed independent music, fashion and arts scene which had spawned Factory and it’s ilk was given the pocket now known as the Northern Quarter, an area full of properties that, short of a second bomb, couldn’t be leased to any high street chains due to the squalid state of most of the buildings, and many of the inhabitants.

The area was rebranded as a centre for bohemian chic as if giving it a name ending in “quarter” would turn it into Soho or Greenwich Village overnight, but for the most part, until recently it was still the same motley selection of record shops and rough pubs that had always been there. You can’t polish a turd.

Part of the problem was that the area had long been home to just about every voluntary agency in the city centre, and home to their clients as well. Just as you can’t imagine Gianni Versace kicking used syringes from the step of Via Manoze with a loafered toe on his way into his office, this mixture of the creative bourgeois and the hopelessly dysfunctional poor didn’t gel as well in practice as in theory, though it did give the area certain seedy charm. There were moments of grim humour though, the Hearing Voices Network had its helpline offices on Oldham Street for while, I remember peering though the window and seeing the call centre volunteers chatting away earnestly, although the phones were never connected.

But as if to prove Alistair Crowley right, that you can will something into existence if you say it’s name often enough for long enough, the area is at last starting to live up to the hype and develop a character of it’s own.

The first thing you notice as being different from most of Manchester are the people, specifically the men, who are in their own way as unique as those on Canal street, but much uglier. These are the fellows with the perfect quarter inch beards, dressed head to ankle in Bench clothes (if Bench make underpants, these guy are wearing them), topped off with ridiculous OTT old school trainers. These are 45 year olds dressed as 15 year olds, like sufferers of a slow form of Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome. The Northern Quarter is the only place in town to see the over 40’s skateboarding and wearing big shorts and Vans. Dignity, gentlemen please, act your age, not your follicle count. These blokes seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in Cord and Odd, drinking expensive foreign lagers and chewing the fat, or maybe the Phat. They are usually discussing “Nights” they put on at one bar or another. A “Night” is a bit like a disco where no one dances, or a pub with music so loud you can’t talk. Given the proliferation of these superannuated teenagers, there’s an inordinate number of “Nights” on at the various bars in the Northern quarter, as if a normal night out isn’t up to much unless it’s a “Night”. On the other hand, it’s rare to see any women over 25 out and about in the Northern Quarter bars, but maybe that’s the idea.

If you can’t stomach a “Night”, there’s a great selection of pubs around the area, a few of which seem to have come into their own over the last couple of years. Former UFC cage The King may have been spruced up and reborn as The Northern, featuring John Cooper Clarke wallpaper, expensive drinks and “Nights”, but it’s former partner in crime Gullivers is still open for ante meridiem karaoke if that’s more your bag. The Castle Hotel, a true Manchester institution for many years under the stewardship of the redoubtable Kath Smethurst, has recently been taken over and given a thorough internal renovation by new landlord (and Corrie star) Rupert Hill. If the roof drainage/urinal hybrid device has gone, I will be disappointed.

Up the road on Swan Street, the Copper Kettle is worth a visit, even if the ceiling is falling in because it’s “listed”, as is the Fringe bar nearby, and next to Band on the Wall is the best of all the Northern Quarter pubs, the Smithfield (beer festival 24-26 April). The venerable Dry Bar seems to be dying on its arse, last time I walked past it was closed by 10pm on a weekday evening, but that’s no bad thing, it spawned a hundred imitators who have collectively ruined the atmosphere of the city centre at night, so good riddance to Dry and all the stinking chrome c**ts.

If you need to line your stomach first, the Northern Quarter caters for every kind of taste and pocket. The Koffee Pot has reopened minus the mice, and the Soup Kitchen does what it says on the tin (not that I’m suggesting….). If you prefer curry, there’s the famous This and That and Aladdin’s where the dishes are passed up by disembodied hands through a trapdoor in the floor. These are both more authentic and far better value for money than anything in the Rusholme theme park. Oklahoma is both a café and a shop full of psychedelic tat, and Manchester Buddhist Centre run the vegetarian Earth Café nearby. If you’re feeling a bit more flush, there is the wonderful Sweet Mandarin Chinese restaurant opposite the craft centre, and if you’ve just won the lottery, there’s the Market Restaurant next door.

For live music, there’s a few more intimate venues around the Northern Quarter area, with Night and Day, Ruby Lounge, Mint Lounge and Roadhouse offering a variety of eclectic indie acts most nights of the week. I’d recommend filling your booze boots before you go to watch a band at any of these though, as the beer prices are steep in all of them, and they haven’t really adapted to the smoking ban yet, none of them offer a covered smoking area for the modern day pariah. The daddy of them all, Band On The Wall is due to reopen in September after a four year gap, promising a café, educational projects and improved facilities. Talking of facilities, they used to have a special balcony for smokers, I’m not sure what the new arrangements will be.

A few of the pubs have occasional live music, jam nights and poetry or comedy clubs, the Bay Horse standing out. The Frog and Bucket was one of the first comedy clubs in Manchester and is still going strong, it’s got a good atmosphere and the audiences are less belligerent than in the more famous Comedy Store, where they keep lions and sawdust backstage for particularly weak acts.

The Northern Quarter pushes itself more than anything as a retail centre with more character and individuality than the Market Street/ Deansgate chains. A few of Manchester’s long standing independents such as Piccadilly Records, Eastern Bloc and Vinyl Exchange are still in place and have been joined by some choice second hand shops such as Vintage (second hand clothes, great stock, overpowering musty smell), American Graffiti (similar, with air freshener) and Den (old furniture, Chorlton prices), and a shop full of weird purple stuff for Satanists. Afflecks palace remains as much of bustling haven for young alternative types as it did in the 80’s when a deaf punk (unfortunately one of the first people to be hit by a tram) used to stand on the stairs with a sign that said “50p please for cider”. Manchester craft centre is a hidden treasure, situated in a Victorian market building, and home to local artists, craftspeople and designers and an incongruously tranquil atmosphere.

Put all this together, and the Northern Quarter stands with a definite identity of late, love it or hate it. Yes, it’s pretentious and posy as hell, and a lot of it represents nothing more than extra money for less old rope, but as the rest of town has had the character ripped out of it by developers, it’s a pretty good use of the last bit of old Manchester left.

It would be better still if they’d kept the best of what was there before, if the fruit and veg stalls on Thomas Street were still trading, and you could still buy a monkey on Tib Street. I can’t imagine Benchman in his dotage reminiscing about when it was all Dubstep and Dildo’s around here, the way older people do about the pet shops, but it’s ok, it’s finally getting there. On the facebook page for the area someone describes it as “A gutter, yet a heaven”, which proves that you can be a student, yet a retard (maybe he’s an aca-demmick. Boom! Tsch!). It’s somewhere that will prise the students away from Oxford Road, it’s somewhere to hang out when you don’t feel like growing up, and it’s somewhere to avoid the Cheshire brawl of Deansgate on a Saturday night. It’s somewhere for a cheap curry or an expensive hat, for a “Night” or just a slightly more relaxed night. Given time it’ll hopefully consolidate the developments of the last few years, and in turn become established on the back of it’s strengths, like a dirty, litter strewn, pornographic version of “The Lanes” in Brighton. It’s showing promise; don’t call the bombers in, not yet.

This article first appeared in Chimp Magazine #3

Hulme

It only takes a little prodding to make an old Hulmites eyes mist over all rose tinted (or just a bit red), and for them to start reminiscing about the halcyon days of the Crescents, as if recalling some kind of 24/7 version of Glastonbury that went on for years. This is always tempered by a sense of great disappointment and betrayal at what has been built in it’s place, that the community of Hulme was once again sold a lie as it was in the early 60’s when the Victorian housing was pulled down and the crescents went up.

This period is more than amply served by the excellent exhulme.co.uk, an online resource packed with old photos and anecdotes from the legendary days of the crescents, which seems, for better or worse, an age away from the modern, regenerated, disinfected yet totally flawed model which has slowly, very very slowly, come to replace it.

I caught the old Hulme at it’s death in the mid 90’s when it did indeed resemble the Glastonbury of the time, when the gangs had burrowed in under the fence to pillage at will, and the utopian dream had died under the weight of hard drugs and neglect. The last couple of big outdoor parties I went to there were dispersed in the small hours, not by the police, but by mobs of teenagers with machetes intent on robbing and trashing, and I remember spending a long night in someone’s flat listening to the stones smack against the windows frames, waiting for the sun to come up so that I could leave and go home without being decapitated on the way.

Fast forward a few short years and the new Hulme is about to be launched, the demagogue Ferguson is opening the new shiny, illuminated bridge on Stretford Road. The model proposed is that a mixture of public and private housing, and new retail and leisure services for the residents will attract a new, aspirant population to Hulme to drive a swift and spectacular regeneration of the area. Over the next few years, the rebuilding stalled and stalled again, the old residents were rehoused relatively quickly, but several of the new private developments remained half built for years, and much of the area remained as ugly wasteground. Eventually the lights in the new bridge started to go out one by one, and the Council realised that they could not source replacements and so the bridge, the symbol of the brave new Hulme got slowly darker, and Hulme limped towards the millennium half finished, and as ever, badly let down.

So, twelve years down the line, are we there yet? In a nutshell, the vision of a regenerated new Hulme led by an influx of affluent young professionals never happened. The young professionals never bought into it, preferring the City Centre developments or the chichi suburbs of Chorlton and Didsbury. Instead, the council seems intent on selling area, stage by stage, to Manchester Metropolitan University to do with as it wants. The relationship between the Met and the Council regarding planning is simply that of the Council bending over, while the University stands behind with a fistful of grant money. Already the whole of the area of Hulme adjacent to the MMU has been given over to imposing halls of residence which completely block out the sun for residents and visitors alike, with plans to build more along Stretford Road, which is currently being opposed by local residents tired of the noise, mess and antisocial behaviour which always goes along with having a large student population concentrated in a small area. The vision of building a new, stable, sustainable community has been critically compromised in favour of a largely transient population in exchange for university funding. The area alongside Stretford road by the bridge, for example, long left as a desolate playground for muggers, which was initially earmarked for community use, leisure facilities, tennis courts and even allotments were promised at one stage, is now going to become part of the MMU campus.

There are echoes of the old days secreted around the place, though, if you know where to look. The area known as the Red Bricks is a reminder of the halcyon times, but walking around there always reminds me a bit of Mad Max. I have seen Tina Turner around there on more than one occasion, and she appears to have gone to seed since the 1980’s and developed a fondness for cider, but still has the same hairstyle. Looking at the array of elderly lorries parked around the area, you’d conclude that everyone in the Red Bricks worked in removals. It’s here that you find a lot of the people who were here in the days of the Crescents alongside idealistic young activists called things like “Pish” and “Skunki”, who’s political “actions” seem to involve riding bikes around and listening to awful 90’s techno, and occasionally sitting about in horrible empty buildings until they are inevitably evicted.. Gawd bless ‘em, they’ll be bankers in a few years, but there’s no better time to explore anarcho-syndicalism for a bit and (blows whistle and adopts a weird forest of dean accent) MAKE SOME NOISE!! than during the current recession when the graduate banking internships are a bit thin on the ground. To be fair there have been some genuinely impressive innovations around the Redbricks area such as the free broadband that they plumbed in (to the councils chagrin) years before anyone else had it. On the other hand, there is Leaf Street Gardens, a jealously guarded collection of random weeds.

There’s also a strange gated community called Homes for Change (aka Bakersville or Baco, after it’s founder, the Bicycle God) which is either a pioneering experiment in tenant participation or a collection of polygamous survivalists armed to the teeth and waiting for the “Feds” to invade, I’m never quite sure which. They all share the same strange stary eyes of The Leader. However, Kim by the Sea, the café situated in the bottom of it is well worth a visit.

One of the main selling points of the “New Hulme” vision was a retail area to act as a hub for local community, finally the area was to have a proper high street. The high street consists of Asda, Argos, Instore and the bedraggled remains of Hulme Market. When the market was opened it showed a great deal of promise and a greater deal of foolish optimism. There were a range of posh food stalls that would make Waitrose blush, a Greek olive seller, a French wine merchant and a stall selling game pies (run by a bloke who looked like Ken Clarke) were among the pricey delights in there. But there were no customers. At the point that the market opened for business in 1999, the existing council tenants had just about been rehoused by the new housing associations, but the projected yuppie flats which were to provide patrons for the market were still at the planning stage. I believe the decision to park the market right next to a new Asda store had been taken by the only drunk with a pen in the park, and not noticed by officials until it was too late, and the company running the market soon went bust. These days, the stallholders are more realistic in what they are selling and there’s a West Indian and an Asian café to provide lunch for the students at Loreto college, but the high turnover of businesses in there still shows how difficult it is to make a go of things, and how ridiculous it was to put it there in the first place. There’s not much to say about the other shops, Asda and Argos are the same everywhere, suffice to say they don’t add much to the character of the area. Stretford Road is starting to perk up a bit, with some nice takeaways, and the Garden Centre opposite Baco is an unexpected delight (watch out for snipers, though), but the high street, the civic hub of Hulme, remains strangely desolate and falls well short of the promises. Again.

For an area formerly reputed to be party central, Hulme is a strangely subdued place by night. There were high hopes when the Arch Bar opened in 2004, with its mixture of club nights, live music and south American food. It didn’t take long for it to morph from a pub into a remand centre and was closed in 2007 after daytime shooting incident. The Afewe (formerly the Grants) and the Gamecock have also closed down, and the Church and the Junction (a wonderful cake-slice of a building) have been hit hard by the smoking ban and seem to be hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Local institution the Salutation seems to be doing relatively well with it’s popular acoustic nights and occasion live band or club nights, but it’s problem is consistency, on a good night, it’s still one of the very best pubs in town, a jovial magnet for eccentrics of all persuasions but on a bad night it’s a morgue with a telly. For the students, there’s the Czech bar which has a fantastic range of beers, and occasional live bands. There’s a sporadic policy of not allowing non-students in, however, and the bar is shut during university holidays. The Zion Arts Centre on Stretford road offers a wide range of participatory opportunities for young people in the area to get involved with drama, video/film making and music and the theatre has a surprising range of bands on such as Bat for Lashes and The Slits (one of my favourite bands, who played as part of something called Ladyfest, and I was too embarrassed to go!) as well as a lot of international music and theatre productions.

I don’t know if you can say that there is a Hulme at all these days in the old sense, the concept of community seems to have been consciously designed out of it by the powers that be. The way that things are evolving it would be less confusing to rename it MMU campusSouth sooner rather than later. For those who came out if the wreckage of the old anarchic Hulme hoping that the brighter future promised by the Council would include at least an element of the character of the place have been badly let down. But that’s the established pattern for this area, and in history, patterns are repeated time and time again. In the end he who pays the planner names the tune.

Only when the last tree has been felled, only when the last pub has closed, only when the last drunk has been turned out of spider park, will you realise that students cannot be eaten. Amen.

This article first appeared in Chimp Magazine #2

Chorlton

“Chorlton-cum-Hardy is a wonderful place, like a smile on a battered and bruised childs face…”
(Mike Garry)

“I think that I’m surrounded, this hideous lifestyle has caught on, give me bacon and eggs, sausage, fried bread and get me the fuck out of chorlton!!” (Rev Porl)

“Get out of the road, you ovulant oaf” (Mark E Smith)

Nestled in the armpit of central south Manchester is the suburb described by one of Chimps predecessors as “The Crouch End of the north”. I used to visit Crouch End quite a bit at one point, around the time Mr Trebus was holding out against the march of council planning and safety and hygiene in general, and was featured on the BBC’s “Life of grime” programme.. Septegenarian punk legend Charlie Harper lived above the electrical shop, Sean Hughes headed the quiz team in my friends local, where he was frequently heckled by Captain Sensible, and the Eurythmics Dave Stewart held forth from a large converted Church. Crouch End was one of those places where eccentric celebrities rubbed shoulders with even more eccentric locals, creating a mildly bohemian chaos among the leafy streets and genteel properties. Surely what London does first, Manchester eventually does better, but the “New Crouch End” is a pretty fat hat to wear….

The name Chorlton likely derives from 'tún' (meaning farm, settlement or homestead) and 'ceorl' (meaning a freeman of the lowest class), giving us a full title similar to 'settlement of the peasants', which couldn’t be further from the kind of image it would like to present to the world. This is the land of the lefty middle class writ large, one of the newsagents on Beech Road has the largest sales of liberal lifestyle magazine”The Guardian” than any other outlet outside of London. The main occupation in Chorlton, throughout the day at least, appears to be competitive parenting, where overqualified and underemployed women in Crocs and EAT YOUR GREENS rafia bags march the next generation of neurotics around in buggies larger than the average family car, and spend the afternoons in one of the many coffeeshops breastfeeding and comparing feats of potty training. You can easily imagine the race for school places involving poison, kidnap and bulldozers round here, and if the good Burghers of Chorlton tried to impose a lottery system like the one introduced in Brighton, there’d be carnage the like of which not seen since the crusades. It’s a shame that this overwhelming air of snobbery (and nappies) permuates the atmosphere, as Chorlton does have it’s charms and quirks and a character of it’s own free of the clonetown vibe of, say Sale or Urmston.

Chorlton is home to an array of independent retailers in food, booze, fashion, cheap shoes, keys, mirrors, records and pure tat. Some of it clearly aimed at those with far more money than taste, but there’s bargins and weirdness aplenty as well. When the people from the papers write about Chorlton, it’s always this Boutique or that Brasserie, they always ignore my favourite part, Chorlton precinct, a magnificent if petit work of 70’s archeitecture, like a Bonsai version of Stockport preicinct where I spent my own youth eating spare ribs and leering at girls. I can’t begin to describe the joys of Quality Save and the Red Cross shop and the place that sells odd shoes by weight. Add in the ??? butchers and two notable grocers and you’ve as much Chorlton as you really need to see, and the exposed benches in the only uncovered bit of it are the best places to see it from in the rain…

There’s plenty of treasures to be found in the Oxfam book shop on Wilbraham Road, and Chorlton also has a fairly good (if very twee) independent bookshop a little down the road as well as one of the better libraries in the city.
Although Morrisons and Somerfield both have branches in Chorlton centre, Chorlton is better known for independent food suppliers, most notable the Barbican Bakery, Unicorn, and more recently Out of the blue fishmongers and Sushi specialists. It’s the latter that appeals to me, as a Japanese guy (I assume) dressed like an extra in a Jackie Chan film prepares Sushi with a succesion of fine poses and flourishes. Who cares if he’s just dicing a trout, it all looks proper oriental and mysterious (even if it’s a bloke from Irlam in his pyjamas).. The barbican Bakery sells a wider range of breadstuff cakeproduct than I ever thought exsisted, as well as (lovely) sandwiches soup and coffee for the lunchtime trade. One downside is their archaic manual reckoning up and queuing system which overlooks one giant flaw given the location, the good people of Chorlton have no idea how to queue patiently, and the atmosphere in Barbican always seems to crackle with the threat of bourgeois violence, the pram wheel over the foot, the “Dirty Carrots” umbrella to the ribs…
I have no idea what goes on inside the Unicorn, there’s a forcefield of pure smugness which always prevents me passing the threshold of the place although it has to be said that for a grocery which advocates local produce to cut down on food miles, the Unicorn carpark is always full to bursting, as the hoards of the self-righteous, from all over the north west, pollute the local air in the crush for untampered vegetables.

The most aspirant area of Chorlton is that just off Chorlton Green, which itself is next to Chorlton waterpark conservation area (where I was once accused by the local Stazi of being a flasher as I tried to learn how to ride a bicycle aged 34), and most of the retailers here are based on Beech Road, and consist of sub Kings Street fashion retailers and sub Habitat household tat shops, and art galleries that look like they’ve been stocked from a degree show (in chemistry). Whenever I’m there I thank the pubs, the petshop and the pieshop for giving it some semblence of normality. That and the coach trips from Wythenshawe.

Even more than as a spawning ground for the aspirational, Chorlton is famed for its nightlife and pubs, as born out by the hoards who make their way here and ram the pubs and bars way beyond capacity overy weekend. Manchesters fantastic Marble Brewery has both of its suburban outlets here (something about pearls and swine springs to mind) , the Bar and The Marble which both serve, at various times the full range of Marble beers (all Vegan and Organic, if that matters) as well as plenty of guest beers. Also notable are the cosy Beech pub and the Royal Oak, which seems to exist only to provide some kind of karmic balance to the rest of the local nightlife. Most of the bars in Chorlton are of the “Wine and Pine” variety, aiming to provide some kind of sophisticated ambience amongst the minimalist furniture, ambience quickly ruined by the collective squeal of students from the Shires who constitute the majority of the customers in these places. The overiding problem with all of these bars is the sameness of them, Bar 38, Revise and Abode all blur into one over the span of a night on the tiles, with not a grain of character to differentiate one from the other. You can replicate a Chorlton Bar crawl by sitting in almost any bar in Chorlton and changing seats every hour or so. The pick of the bunch is the Iguana, for its regular (and extremely eclectic) blend of comedy, music and spoken word night held thoughout the week, unfortunately come the weekend, it’s much the same as anywhere else. A fairly recent addition is Dulcimer, notable for its mead, lutes and hobbit like patrons which seems completely out of place (although quite lovely) on the outskirts of a city like Manchester.
On the whole, as in Sale or Didsbury, mediocre establishments are oversubscribed by nature of their convenience for people who live nearby, when everyone would be much better off heading to one of the quieter bars in the city centre, if for a night out you require so much as a chair to sit on and the ability to hear the person next to you.

If you come here looking for some kind of Bohemian haven, Chorlton will be some disappointment to you. Unlike similar areas of London, there’s no more than the most z-list of Manchesters artistic and musical community knocking around here, most of the residents are either the posher students (for whom Fallowfield will just not do, darling!) or extremely stern, though well intentioned middle class families, who, to this hacks jaded eyes, have chased the liberal dream so hard, they’ve gone right round in a circle and ended up slightly to the right of Mussolini. The overpowering, conspicuous “ethical” consumption eventually sticks in the craw as much as the 4x4 consumerism of the sunbed armies of Hale or Altrincham, who at least don’t pretend to temper their blatent greed with a waft of manure from the moral high ground.
With a selection of independent stores, and good charity shops, its quite a nice alternative to Market street of a Saturday morning if you fancy a bit of retail therapy, especially for foodies, but as a place to live it’ll only appeal to a very select demographic. For anyone over ten years old or under 30k a year, there really isn’t much for you here, just intolerance and snobbery with a new-age smile like a David Cameron wet dream. If this is the new Crouch end, then dear Mr Trebus is spinning in his grave.

First published in Chimp Magazine Issue 1