It’s no Florentine oil painting, but there are moments of beauty in Manchester. A grapheneblack cormorant breaking the surface of the Irwell, the thick terracotta tiles of the Refuge building that you want to break off like toffee and eat. Earlier this year, I found a fresh view, from the Castlefield Viaduct: a miniature High Line where clematis and ferns sprout amid the girders. Looking across, I could see both the ruins of the Roman fort and the four towers of Deansgate Square, flashing sunlight like beacons marking out new territory. Manchester’s a little greener these days, a little softer. In Mayfield Park, conjured from rail-yard dereliction, I walk over cast-iron beams, half-buried in the grass like fossils.
The River Medlock has been uncovered, kingfishers have returned. People, too. Hard to believe that in the late 1980s, when I was a teenager going to clubs and gigs (an era the city’s self-mythology is far too reliant on; I don’t need to hear “Fools Gold” ever again), only a few hundred lived in the centre. “The shutters slammed down at 5pm; you couldn’t buy a pint of milk,” says Tom Bloxham of architecture studio Urban Splash, which has played a part in the city’s regeneration, most recently with the marina and townhouses of New Islington. “Joined-up thinking has really reinvented Manchester." Right now, it's brimful of confidence: the ambitious new Aviva studios, which opened in October, is an emblem of this – but so is the evolving food and drink scene.
How to get to Manchester
Manchester has the UK's third busiest airport, with flights to 199 destinations. Trains into the city centre run every 10 minutes, seven days a week and take around 20 minutes. Manchester Piccadilly is the city's main train station, with connections from most main train stations throughout the UK. The city has good bus, train and tram services.
The best hotels in Manchester
There are so many empty warehouses to fill… Peacock-coloured Forty-Seven opened in a Peter Street one, while Malmaison Manchester Deansgate has bagged the best views over the refurbished Town Hall. Soho House will land later in 2024 in the former Granada Studios, with motel rooms below the club and its optimistic rooftop pool (would a young Ken Barlow have been allowed in?). Opening in the summer of 2024 is Treehouse Manchester, a sequel to the London debut that’s just as playful (stepping stones in the lobby) but more locally minded: Bury-born chef Mary-Ellen McTague brings a zero-waste approach to the ground-floor restaurant; Belzan chef Sam Grainger will head up the 14th-floor restaurant with a South-East Asian menu, while DJ-restaurateurs Justin Crawford and Luke Cowdrey are fiddling the knobs on the music and live acts. Of recent-ish arrivals, I like The Alan: nudging Chinatown, it’s an exercise in upcycling, with bare plaster walls in the bedrooms and an ethereal, mosaic-floored lobby that appears almost Balearic, linking workspaces, bar and dining room (with Cumbrae oysters and crab cavatelli on the menu, it’s a rare Manchester hotel for eating in at). Leven, meanwhile, may feel familiar to Posh and Becks, who came here when the building housed Mash & Air, the 1990s restaurant where Jason Atherton cut his teeth. Different vibes now, with an art-filled cocktail bar (Black Forest martinis, rhubarb sours) that’s a little pocket of calm amid the Canal Street head rush, and loft-style suites with huge crittall windows. Manchester has a fair few frictionless, hit-the-ground-running hotels, but this is one of the best.
What to do in Manchester
Last summer, I went daytime raving with mummies in New Century Hall; well, actually lace-wrapped performers cavorting to hypnotic techno: a dance piece called “R.O.S.E”. The hall was a new one on me, a black-framed mid-century survivor that hosted Hendrix and acid house, now restored with the original sprung dance floor. Unlike in other cities, there has been a boom in live-music venues, from the intimate Blues Kitchen (head upstairs for an eclectic line-up) to the incoming Co-Op Live arena. Most hyped, though, is the £242-million Aviva Studios, metal origami home to Factory International, the outfit behind the biennial festival. Unlovely on the outside, but inside is a hangar-like space that can be adapted to accommodate any artistic vision. Last summer it was filled with Yayoi Kusama’s giant polka-dot inflatables; in October it saw Danny Boyle’s Matrix reboot, Free Your Mind, a dance spectacular with giant rabbits and lots of PVC. The remit is to bring experimental works to as large an audience as possible – thus continuing a rich Mancunian tradition of culture for all. Over at Manchester Museum, meanwhile, a new gallery showcases the South Asian diaspora, curated by the community and giving a voice to historically marginalised cultures. It’s full of vivid storytelling, none less so than the strikingly witty 55-foot mural by The Singh Twins, which recasts Britannia as an Indian woman, trident held aloft while surveying her Anglo-Asian “Greater Britain”.
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The best street food in Manchester
At some point, Manchester swapped disco biscuits for tacos, and now it seems as if nomadic bands of carpenter-gatherers roam the streets, throwing up food-hall shanty towns amid the bones of industrial hulks. Freight Island sprawls across the Mayfield railway depot next to the new park, midway between fairground and festival, with lazy Sunday sessions where parents reminisce about nights at Sankeys over IPAs. But lo, like a steampunk Godzilla, Diecast has risen in a metalworks nearby, with glitching, avant-garde dancers on walkways, daiquiri machines and rum caravans for hire. Who will win the battle of the giant food halls? See also the smaller, sleeker Society and Kargo MKT, just opened on Salford Quays.
The best restaurants in Manchester
Simon Martin’s Mana may have won the city its only Michelin star, but Erst won the hearts of northern food lovers when it opened in 2018 – a neighbourhood restaurant in the best New York sense. It’s still my favourite place to eat – sit at the counter with a beef-fat flatbread and glass of orange moscatel, and everything feels right in the world. But there’s competition. Higher Ground opened in 2023, from a trio who met at Stone Barns in New York State, testing the terroir with pop-ups and their Flawd wine bar. The Brit-bistro flavour combinations are compelling – pork loin cured in cuttlefish ink, celeriac paired with salted blueberries – with many ingredients grown on its Nantwich market garden. There’s a real sense of an ecosystem taking root here: the farm supplies other restaurants, including the wine-forward Climat from Chester’s Covino team. Speakeasy-elusive at the top of an office block, it serves painstakingly prepped small plates that include hash browns topped with twirls of taramasalata and vol-au-vents sporting quiffs of duck-liver parfait. Elsewhere, lockdown hit 3hands Deli has flexed into Another Hand – caff by day, sharing plates by night – with picks including lion’s mane mushroom in a chocolate mole. Just off Albert Square, meanwhile, Maray is an example of the sort of indie hangout Manchester does really well: punchy street food (in this case Middle Eastern – try the king prawns with white-bean messabecha) with a strong vegan line-up and a free-flowing cocktail list. For a coffee and bhaji buttie, my insider tip is SeeSaw, a coworking space and café down a cobbled alley off Princess Street.
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The best bars in Manchester
As soon as you arrive in Manchester, head straight to Schofield’s Bar, sit at the counter and order a Tuxedo No 2. Gin, dry vermouth, maraschino and bitters. It’ll set you up for the day but also introduce you to one of the best cocktail bars in the UK, sat behind a lovely ironwork deco frontispiece. Bury-born Daniel and Joe Schofield may well be there, wearing white aprons and the sort of faces that peer out of sepia photos from the 1920s. The brothers bring a wealth of experience, picked up at Little Red Door in Paris and Singapore’s Tippling Club; no gimmicks here but classic cocktails, making this part of a new generation of grown-up bars along with Speak in Code (closed-loop, new-wave tiki), Red Light (LGBTQ+) and Sterling, the Schofields’ basement bar in the Stock Exchange Hotel. The margaritas, meanwhile, are excellent at Public on Stevenson Square, the latest from Rusholme curry scion Sax Arshad (Gooey, his NY-styled doughnut joint, inspired Lizzo to post “Manchester got the good good” after sniffling its tofu sando).
There’s a statue of Vimto in Manchester, an oak-carved bottle and berries, but maybe one should be sculpted of a bottle of pét-nat: the city’s awash with natural wine. A bar-hopping tour might start at Flawd for an Austrian rosé before an English Sov’ran Ortega at The Jane Eyre on Cutting Room Square, moving onto Ad Hoc. Out in Levenshulme is Isca, co-owned by Caroline Dubois, sommelier at Where the Light Gets In. “There’s a real feeling of possibility right now,” she says. “Manchester’s food and drink reputation is a recent thing – but it’s drawing in people from around the world with serious experience.”
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