Manchester Lifestyle
Manchester, as the Stone Roses’ Ian Brown once said, has everything – except a beach.
Of all the big regional cities, Manchester is probably the one which, for good or ill, most feels like being in London. It certainly considers itself to be the de facto capital of the North. Thanks in part to its youthful population, 65% of which is under 45 years old, it enjoys the nightlife, culture and sporting events that are the equal of many European capital cities. It is a city of superlatives – it claims the best nightlife, shopping, galleries, museums and theatres in the country, albeit usually with the suffix “outside London”.
Manchester has more students than any other European city and it shows in the diversity – and sheer number – of bars, clubs, music venues and inexpensive places to eat. Nonetheless, for those who have left their student days firmly behind, Manchester still has plenty to offer.
bars and clubs
The Madchester scene, and its epicentre the Hacienda, may have passed into history now, but Manchester still parties 7 nights a week, whether it be with the city’s Premiership footballers in the upmarket bars, such as Loaf, Sugar Lounge or Fat Cat around Deansgate Locks, down at the studenty end of town along Oxford Street and Oxford Road or the grittier Northern Quarter or (for those who like to see some change from a £20 note) simply in one of the city’s traditional pubs, with a pint of Boddingtons. Manchester also has the country’s biggest gay scene outside London, centred around the Canal Street area made nationally famous by the television series Queer as Folk.
The post-Hacienda clubbing scene remains vibrant and there really is something for everyone. The more upmarket clubs, such as Club V and Emporia are in close proximity to the sophisticated bars on Deansgate, while a younger (and louder) scene can found along the Oxford Road at establishments such as the Music Box and the Phoenix.
music scene
Manchester is also rightly famous for its music scene, which has spawned a host of bands that went on to world fame, such as Oasis, New Order, the Smiths, the Stone Roses and, going back a bit further, the Buzzcocks and the Hollies.
Live music can be found all over the city – the larger venues being the Apollo and the Academy, while the visiting megastars play either the M.E.N. Arena (which claims to be the biggest indoor concert venue in Europe) the G-Mex centre (which also claims to be Europe’s largest indoor arena) or the state-of-the-art Bridgewater Hall. The latter plays host to a vast variety of music and other events – at the time of writing, the schedule included Badly Drawn Boy and the Chieftains through to Chris de Burgh, Lesley Garrett, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa... and a cooking demonstration by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It is also the regular home of two of Manchester’s resident orchestras – the Halle and the Camerata – and also hosts regular concerts by the Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic.
cultural attractions
The Bridgewater Hall is probably only rivalled for eclecticism by the Lowry Centre, a dramatic glass and steel arts centre opened in 2000 which, as well as a gallery devoted to Lowry which contains some 300 of his paintings, contains two theatres which stage a variety of plays, music, dance and comedy.
Elsewhere, the historic Palace Theatre (which has hosted the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Luciano Pavarotti and Houdini in its time) offers a mixture of opera, musicals and touring productions headed for London. Rather more serious productions, with an emphasis on new writing, can be found at the 750-seat Royal Exchange Theatre.
Equally visually dramatic is the new Libeskind-designed Imperial War Museum North, opened in 2003. The city has a roster of world-class museums and galleries such as the Manchester Art Gallery (which includes works by Constable, Canaletto and Rodin, a pre-Raphaelite gallery and a collection of 20th century works by David Hockney, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon), the Museum of Science and Industry and Urbis, which, appropriately enough for the world’s first industrial metropolis, is dedicated to the history and future of urban life.
eating out
The range of dining options available in Manchester is vast. The city has the largest Chinatown in the country (again, “outside London”) and is home to the famous Curry Mile, situated in Rusholme. More upmarket eateries, for example the French Restaurant at the Midland Hotel, le Petit Blanc Brasserie and Marco Pierre White’s Piccolino have also flourished in the city centre and top quality restaurants abound in some of the posher suburbs, such as Didsbury, and out into the Cheshire ‘Stockbroker Belt’ of Altrincham, Hale and Alderley Edge. At the less expensive end of the market, frequent honourable mentions go to Mr Thomas’s Chop House, a Victorian pub in Cross Street and the family run Love Saves the Day in the Northern Quarter.
Finally, the city is also a Mecca for sports fans, underlined by its successful hosting of the Commonwealth Games in 2002. It boasts England’s (if not the world’s) biggest football club in Manchester United and two other Premiership sides – Manchester City and Bolton Wanderers. Lancashire play most of their cricket at Old Trafford, which also hosts test matches and international one-day games and Greater Manchester is also home to a plethora of top-flight rugby league sides, one Premiership rugby union club, the Manchester Giants basketball team and an ice hockey team.
Which begs the question - with all this on the doorstep, who needs a beach anyway?
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