Nightlife and entertainment
Manchester’s musical heritage and whopping student population keep things lively and interesting. Clubs change styles depending on the night of the week, and frequently change names; in addition, many of the city’s hip café-bars host regular club nights.
There is also an excellent live music scene, of course, with tickets for local bands usually under £5, perhaps £10–15 for bigger names. Check ubiquitous fly-posters, and the websites listed here, to see what’s on. The bi-annual artist-led Manchester International Festival has included upwards of twenty world premiers of shows by names such as Damon Albarn and Björk.
As for classical music, the city is blessed with the North’s most highly prized orchestra, the Hallé, which is resident at Bridgewater Hall. Other acclaimed names include the BBC Philharmonic and the Manchester Camerata chamber orchestra, who perform at a variety of venues. The Cornerhouse is the local alternative arts mainstay, while a range of mainstream and fringe theatres produce a lively, year-round programme.
Aside from the high-end boutiques on King Street, and the department stores around Market Street and Exchange Square, the city has a plethora of smaller independent stores catering for all tastes. If you’re around between mid-November and the week before Christmas, it’s well worth making for the city’s German Christmas Market, which sees Albert Square transformed into a Bavarian picture postcard.
Manchester’s Gay Village and Gay Pride
The side roads off Portland Street lead down to the Rochdale canal, where Canal Street forms the heart of Manchester’s thriving Gay Village: the pink pound has filled this area of the city with canalside cafés, clubs, bars and businesses. Always lively, the village is packed to bursting point during Manchester’s huge Gay Pride festival, which usually occurs on the last weekend of August. The village is closed off as thousands of revellers descend for music – big-name performers have included Beth Ditto and Boy George – comedy, theatre and exhibitions, all celebrating lesbian, gay, bi, and trans-gendered sexuality.
Brief history of Manchester
Despite a history stretching back to Roman times, and pockets of surviving medieval and Georgian architecture, Manchester is first and foremost a Victorian manufacturing city. Its rapid growth set the pace for the flowering of the Industrial Revolution elsewhere – transforming itself in just a hundred years from little more than a village to the world’s major cotton centre.
The spectacular rise of Cottonopolis, as it became known, arose from the manufacture of vast quantities of competitively priced imitations of expensive Indian calicoes, using water and then steam-driven machines developed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This rapid industrialization brought immense wealth for a few but a life of misery for the majority.
The discontent this came to a head in 1819 when eleven people were killed at Peterloo, in what began as a peaceful demonstration against the oppressive Corn Laws. Things were, however, even worse when the 23-year-old Friedrich Engels came here in 1842 to work in his father’s cotton plant: the grinding poverty he recorded in his Condition of the Working Class in England was a seminal influence on his later collaboration with Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto.
The Manchester Ship Canal, constructed in 1894 to entice ocean-going vessels into Manchester and away from burgeoning Liverpool, played a crucial part in sustaining Manchester’s competitiveness. From the late 1950s, however, the docks, mills, warehouses and canals were in dangerous decline.
The main engine of change turned out to be the devastating IRA bomb, which exploded outside the Arndale shopping centre in June 1996, wiping out a fair slice of the city’s commercial infrastructure. Rather than simply patching things up, the city council embarked on an ambitious rebuilding scheme, which transformed the face of the city forever.
Top image: Castlefield District, Manchester, UK - shutterstock