Joe Bishop bothers the cobbles of Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Manchester. Home of the bee, Andy Burnham and baggy. A football team everyone loves to hate and another team everyone used to hate. Industrial revolutions and warehouse projects. It’s the second city that could. It’s a cultural behemoth that has, admittedly, seen better days on that front, but still manages to pop out an Aitch or a 1975 when it wants to.
It cannot be doubted that the city has its own character and charm. But it also has a unique crapness that perhaps no other place in the uk has, best embodied in the party district overrun with chintzy themed bars known as the Northern Quarter.
My terrible superiority complex as a Londoner is ingrained. It’s a tribalism informed by, as it always is, skewed ‘facts’: London is the epicentre, the birthplace of all that is cool, with Manchester limply trailing behind.
London has its own centres of cringe, of course, from the ballpit caves of Shoreditch to Camden Market, where you might spot Eating with Tod and his lobotomised grin, covered in gravy, tearing some poor unsuspecting mozzarella stick asunder. But the Northern Quarter is special. It’s so derided by locals that they even make fun of it on Coronation Street.
As the sort of guy who won’t go to a pub unless there’s a memorial portrait behind the bar of an old man who died there, I felt I needed to find out what was going on. Like all snobbish authentocrats, I find the idea of others enjoying themselves with fun and games completely bilious. The Northern Quarter and its wincingly awful themed watering holes are anathema to me. So I travelled there on a Friday night to embark on a ‘cringe crawl’, and get to the heart of what makes this part of ‘Mann-eh’ so mortifying, one parodical cocktail at a time.
My first stop is Definitely Maybe, the Oasis-themed bar in the basement of historic shopping emporium Afflecks. At the time of my visit, the Gallaghers were blasting through their reunion tour dates at Wembley Stadium, a brief Porsche-stop away from the north London castles in which they chose to live long ago. I open a large metal door adorned with the band’s logo, and find a dusty old staircase leading into a corridor filled with beer barrels and driftwood detritus. It quickly becomes apparent that I’ve entered through the back entrance by mistake.
Around the front, though, I get another shock: a young woman is sitting in a small booth with a laptop and a card machine. She tells me it’s £5 entry. I tell her the back door is unlocked and I was just rooting around in the bar’s bowels like Indiana Jones. She tells me it’s not her fault.
Definitely Maybe is effectively a gift shop with a bar in it. It is, of course, blasting Oasis through the speakers at deafening volumes, and playing the accompanying music videos on giant plasma screens. It has the strange aroma of terrible northern European pizza, the sort of thing you get to quell the hangover sickness on a Moravian stag do. They serve juicy flatbreads here along with some other anonymous bar snacks. But I’m not here to eat.
The bar has a small, perfunctory exhibit about the band, which reminds me of those primary school partitions which teachers adorn with children’s terrible art. I suppose this justifies the price of entry. With a Guinness in hand, poured well in alignment with the stringent demands of the brewery, I look around the exhibit, following a wistful middle-aged man grinning ear to ear and taking hundreds of photos. There are a few children in here, including a girl in a United shirt roaming around, quietly singing along to Morning Glory.
As this is a themed cocktail crawl of sorts, I decide I need to try one of the specialist Britpop bevs on offer. Strangely, some of the cocktails refer to the works of other bands, most notably the Bitter Sweet Symphony. I opt for a Rock and Roll Star Martini, a vanilla vodka concoction that comes with a shot glass filled with poisonous prosecco. It is incredibly, illegally vile.
Aside from its slightly outrageous entry fee and its general charmlessness, Definitely Maybe is hardly a bar that epitomises the sort of crime that oozes from other parts of the Northern Quarter. It is, at the very least, themed around something people actually care about, even if that thing is Oasis. You could say, perhaps, that I ‘rolled with it’.
My next stop is Rewind. Rewind used to be called Blockbusters, and was so for three years, until a cease and desist from the copyright owner plopped its way through the letterbox and forced them into changing it. It is, as you might have guessed, themed around the now-defunct video rental chain Blockbuster. The millennial soul pines for physical media, the analogue whine of a tape being wound inside a vcr. Here one can but observe the shell of these relics, boxes empty like canopic jars rid of their precious pharaoh guts.
I take a glance at the menu and see a drink called a Sorting Hat, a vodka cocktail which is imbued with a coloured syrup based on which Hogwarts house the barman thinks you should belong to. It’s served to me in luminous green, indicating I’m off to the wizarding world’s very own Westboro Baptist Church, Slytherin.
‘Ooh! Am I giving Slytherin vibes?’ I ask, playing along.
‘Uh, yeah,’ he replies.
‘How do you choose who’s in what house?’
‘I sort of just pick whichever colour is nearest to me to be honest,’ he says. I tell him people must get pretty peeved when they get a house they don’t align with personality-wise. He affirms that they do, and I sensed that he rather enjoyed it when this happened, a gleeful sort of millennial mental terrorism.
Through a metal bead curtain sits another section of the bar, still with its vhs lining, but this time bathed in red light. The tapes are now porn. A neon sign at the back exclaims ‘sex, drugs & vhs’. Printed images of big tits and hard knobs adorn the walls.
This seems a little incongruous considering how twee the foyer of the bar is. All the videos displayed there were things like Babe: Pig in the City and The bfg. Now it was all Airtight Granny 6 and Mona the Virgin Nymph. I take a proper look at the menu to order another drink and discover many of them have similarly puerile names, Piglet’s Pleasure being a particularly sick-making example, as is the incomprehensible brutality of the Bubble-Gin Bitch. In the end, I opt for another saccharine drink in purest green: Shrek’s Schlong.
Across the road from Rewind is a place called Behind Closed Doors, or bdc as its neon sign insists. bdc’s theme is a 70s San Fernando Valley-style pornographic boudoir. It’s dimly lit, there are blow-up dolls dressed in lingerie in cages, and rotary phones decorating the walls. Perhaps most upsettingly though, there is actual porn playing on small crt televisions. I’m not talking about heavy petting either. Suck jobs and full penny.
This is at the heart of the issue with these places: they’re a child’s idea of an adult’s indulgence. All of these bars appear to have been conceptualised by a 14-year-old boy in the year 2002. Blockbuster, Oasis, vhs porn, smutty jokes, the constant feeling you should be masturbating. The Northern Quarter is a theme park of millennial arrested development, each venue a different signifier of the refusal to grow up. It’s as if a normal pub or wine bar simply does not serve the synapses enough; there isn’t enough sugar or flashing lights or ‘remember when?’. The discovery of youth must be endlessly replicated, not in its magic or beauty but in its fatuous sniggering.
My next stop is the Washhouse. A fake launderette façade, accessed by a phone and entered through a vending machine, a secret menu – it had it all.
The launderette theme surprisingly ends at the door, and the interiors are actually quite pared down. Dark wood panelling, relatively tasteful dangling light fittings, banquette seating. A chirpy waitress bowls over to me and hands me a menu. ‘It’s all themed around conspiracy theories,’ she tells me.
There’s an Alien Abduction, a syrupy, ube ice cream concoction with lavender and sloe gin, a Mass Hysteria with Calvados and almond foam. But I opt for a Global Warming, an interesting thing to place in a list of conspiracy theories. It comes served in a strange, green prison that coughs up dry ice. The drink itself is unsurprisingly milkshake-y, but there’s a moment when, after taking an ill-advised bite of a chilli and sucking too much boozy ice cream through the straw, I have both a burning mouth and brain freeze. An idiotic scenario to find myself in. While I attempt to recover from this indignity, I listen to the couple next to me, wondering where ‘the secret slide is’.
There we have it again: the inner child not crushed down by nihilism and pain and lager and fags, but bursting out like a spring-loaded boxing glove, ready to eat ice cream and trundle down the slide. These Northern Quarter crèches invite you to giggle and clap and laugh, to smirk at bawdy jokes, to live in a giant trifle of nostalgia and easy memories. Manchester has created for itself an enclave where millennials can live in the echoes of their youth, all their favourite music, their first erections, their favourite flavour of fizzy pop. Only now they can supplement it with cocaine.
My last stop is The Peveril of the Peak, an oblong boozer which people like me would describe as a ‘proper pub’; green tiles, stained glass over the bar, too many people ordering Guinness. I come in the hope of finding Manchester’s young and cool sinking real pints and wanting to tell me how shit they thought the nq was. But I’m met with groups of students who, actually, think it’s alright. They think it’s fun. They work at the bars there. It’s okay.
In reality, my highfalutin London posturing about Manchester simply doesn’t work in 2025. The capital has been morphing into a version of this for the last decade, with its blank newbuilds, expensive pints and nightclubs with interactive clay pigeon shooting. To mock the Northern Quarter for its cloying need to evoke recent history is to mock all of our relationships with our circular culture of nostalgia – a worthy endeavour, but the target is an unfair scapegoat.
If anything, the cultural roles have now reversed, and it’s the second city that is creating the blueprint for modern British nightlife: a place where you never have to grow old, and can exist, pissed, tumescent and laughing, inside a past you barely remember.
