Hit the North: a stroll through magnificent Manchester

Manchester Northern Quarter is the perfect example of the city’s infectious creativity.

All photos © copyright Matthew Brace

The Northern Quarter wasn’t called the Northern Quarter when I was at university in Manchester in the late 1980s. It wasn’t called anything. Bits of it were known as ‘back of Piccadilly’ or ‘towards Ancoats’ and, to quote the locals, ‘it were right skanky’.

I used to brave its streets to attend gigs at the fabulous Band On The Wall venue. The bar is still going strong but its surroundings look very different. After some clever planning, innovative urban design and a canny rebranding exercise, the Northern Quarter is now Manchester’s hippest ’hood.

It’s a bustling, creative city within a city, which maintains Manchester’s unique gritty-but-friendly identity. It’s full of great pubs, top bistros and cafes, independent record shops, fashion boutiques, art galleries, design stores and a great collection of street art.

The Northern Quarter has studied Manchester’s secrets and improved on them.

Pies ’n’ ale

It was a warm and sunny spring evening when I arrived and the after-work drinkers were embracing the balminess. The bars were packed and people were spilling out onto the pavements.

I wandered in the sunlight down the back alleys until I stumbled on Pie ‘n’ Ale. Manchester is very much a pie ’n’ ale town. Numerous venues serve them, filled with anything from plain old steak to lentil curry and even spiced duck served on a banana leaf.

I tucked in to a delicious venison and Stilton cheese variety, downed a crisp pint of hoppy beer and headed into the city centre to meet a friend. We dropped into some old haunts, including Mr Thomas’s Chop House, which still does fantastic fish and chips, and the City Arms, which still has one of the best selections of local real ales in town.

Street style

Next morning, bright and early—about 11-ish—I strolled through the Northern Quarter to find some of its street art. This has largely been the work of a project called Cities Of Hope, which invited leading street artists to create works to raise awareness of social issues. My favourite was an eye-catching piece on Faraday Street by Norwegian stencil artist Martin Whatson.

These murals change from time to time—I understand some coronavirus-related ones have popped up—but hopefully the yellow bees in Stevenson Square will still be there when you visit. The worker bee is a Manchester motif that symbolises the city’s world-famous industrial heritage: a working class town that was once at the heart of the Industrial Revolution.

Food and fashion

For a very late breakfast I dropped in to the diner-style Koffee Pot café and consumed a mountainous northern fry-up and a vast pot of tea. Perfect fuel for a shopping blitz. Down at the southern edge of the Northern Quarter is Afflecks, a labyrinthine indoor market with more than 70 independent stores wedged shoulder-to-shoulder over several floors. There are clothes, records, hairdressers—even tarot card readers. The Joy Division t-shirt I bought is getting favourable comments back home but, looking back on it, I probably didn’t need the frayed top hat.

That evening I retraced my student steps to Band On The Wall. According to its excellent and comprehensive website history, it got its nickname when 1930s licensee Ernie Tyson constructed a platform for the jazz bands suspended half way up one wall. Back then, the establishment was officially known as the George and Dragon but everyone soon began calling it The Band on the Wall. The musicians were later allowed to descend to play at ground level, much to their relief I imagine.

At the bar, I swapped stories with people I didn’t know and saw a band I had never heard of play songs I didn’t recognise. It was, as the Mancunians might say, champion!

This an amended version of an article that first appeared in Holidays for Couples magazine in Australia.