Your Northern Quarter memories
Oops, The Manchizzle caught me a bit off-guard.
We’ve got Big Plans for a podcasting project about Manchester and you, dear readers, can help us out.
What we want are your memories - old or new - of Manchester’s Northern Quarter. It can be something about the worst greasy spoon cafe you’ve visited, or when Ryan Adams bought a CD from your shop.
Were you caught up in the naked cyclist protest earlier this year? Who is the most colourful character you’ve met there? Perhaps you remember when all this was fields. If so, just how dangerous were those fields at night?
Leave a comment here please.
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Some memories
Mid to late-1970s. Tib Street’s shops for the teenage passing fads - pet shops and model aircraft supplies – and, later, skateboarding.
Early 1980s. The curry cafes, including those we have lost: the Lahore – stir the ghee in, sit near the broken windows and you could risk a post-meal spliff, don’t go near the toilet; Yaqub’s, originally in the building where the Kabana is now located, then displacing the Lahore, dense, juicy cubes of lamb karahi and lamb tikka (how did they do that?); and, up the worn, crooked stone steps, the Shalimar, so small that conversation with fellow diners was inevitable. Also the Cuckoo Chef - now the fried chicken place on the corner of Oldham Street and Hilton Street – a bit more upmarket and open in the evening.
Drinking. More Shudehill than the Northern Quarter but the now demolished Castle and Falcon. Then the finest pint of bitter in Manchester and Burtonwood’s at that. Fine beer also in the Wheatsheaf, near the Craft Centre and those redbrick flats housing some of the first city dwellers. Later Dry opened - unbelievably exciting on the Friday and Saturday evenings of Madchester and acid house, even before you’d taken your drugs. And if you didn’t go on to a club from there you could pop over the road to PJ Bells, now Matt and Phred’s, which had a rare late license but you had to endure arsey notices on the wall telling you not to talk during the sax solos.
Regeneration, mid-1990s onwards. Urban Splash opened Smithfield Buildings and the area took off. Piccadilly Records, the most important shop in the world, opened up on the ground floor. But later one of the area’s new residents complained about the noise from Night and Day. Words cannot explain the fuckery of someone who moves into a city centre and complains about the noise of an old and favourite venue. Somewhere along the line “that bit beyond Piccadilly where the textile wholesalers are� becomes the soi-disant Northern Quarter.
1999-2005. Love Saves The Day. Fine food, wine and coffee, lovely staff. When I was working in town it could be three times a day - take away a coffee in the morning, have another after a curry lunch, and then a bottle of wine on the way home. When I was working at home I’d still pop in regularly mid-afternoon to read the papers. I even assumed a regular seat, next to the counter looking out the window, the better to ponder Northern Quarter questions such as why smackheads always walk in that mincing way as if their ankles have been tied together with a short length of string. I can understand the hurry but longer strides, fellows, longer strides. Siting the Commonwealth Games office on Ancoats St was a smart move because it forced many people to walk down Tib St and discover an area they never knew existed. Rents went up, prohibitively in some cases.
By Kev on 10.31.06 4:23 pm
Welcome to Manchester-live.tv, the UK’s first local-based online television service. Here you will find everything and anything related to Manchester, from the origins of Northern Soul to the latest celebrity events.
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By Matthew Stansfield on 02.04.08 2:14 am
‘Hello World!’ Rob Bailey Exhibiton at Common, Northern Quarter.
A short clip of the launch can be viewed on Manchester Live TV: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1335549268/bclid1343612375/bctid1400566422
By Matthew Stansfield on 02.04.08 2:23 am
Ah, the Castle and Falcon. Because it was used by the local ‘Old Bill’ and ‘ladies of the night’, it was affectionately called: The Cu*t and Truncheon’, happy days.
By Ed Vaughan on 03.07.08 10:45 am
Film: Let’s Go Expo 2008 and Manchester-Live.tv » Mancubist: Life is good in Manchester
[...] according to this comment, Manchester’s online TV community just grew some more: Welcome to Manchester-live.tv, the [...]
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