Comments Posted By Kev

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In Manchester, Without My Car

Hey Mancubist – great site, can’t believe I haven’t stumbled across you before! I’ve added your feed to my RSS reader already.

I can’t find a email address to contact you on, and want to invite you to a night I’m running – can you mail me on kev at bestfootforward.info ? Thanks!

Comment Posted By Kev On 22.09.2007 @ 10:29

Your Northern Quarter memories

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.

Comment Posted By Kev On 31.10.2006 @ 16:23

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