A Victorian pub with a floor that slopes uphill on purpose, and the four or five others worth crossing the city for.
Manchester drinks well, and its best pubs are Victorian, unmodernised, and mostly not where the crowds are.
The Marble Arch
Built in 1888 on Rochdale Road, and the thing everyone notices within a minute of walking in: the floor slopes upward from the door to the bar.
It is not subsidence. It was built that way, so that spillage and washing water ran back down to the entrance and out. The barrel-vaulted ceiling, the glazed brick walls and the tiled frieze listing the drinks on offer are all original, and the frieze is a period document — you can read what a Manchester pub sold in 1888 off the wall.
It is also the tap for the Marble Brewery, which started brewing here in 1997 and was one of the pubs that made Manchester a serious beer city. The beer is very good and much of it is vegan.
The others worth the walk
Britons Protection, Great Bridgewater Street — 1806, tiled corridors, coal fires, several small rooms, and a mural commemorating Peterloo, which happened a few hundred yards away. Enormous whisky list. It faced closure and was saved; it is a Grade II listed pub doing exactly what it has always done.
Peveril of the Peak, Great Bridgewater Street — a free-standing wedge of a building covered entirely in green and brown glazed tiles, marooned by road-widening, with a table-football table in the middle and the same family behind the bar for decades.
The Circus Tavern, Portland Street — tiny, no bar staff visible until someone appears, two rooms, and a wall of Manchester United photographs.
The Temple, Great Bridgewater Street — a converted Victorian public lavatory below street level, reached down steps, with a jukebox that is a local institution.
Sinclair’s Oyster Bar and The Old Wellington in Shambles Square are genuinely half-timbered, genuinely old, and have genuinely been moved twice — once for the Arndale in the 1970s and again after the 1996 bomb, which is why two Tudor buildings sit in a modern square looking slightly confused.
Practical
Most kitchens stop early — around eight or nine — and several of these pubs do not serve food at all.
Cask beer is the thing to order. Manchester and the surrounding towns have a dense independent brewing scene, and a pub like the Marble Arch will have four or five on that were made within ten miles.
Last orders across the centre are generally eleven on weeknights, later at weekends, and the Northern Quarter is where the late licences are.
