Record shops, murals, coffee and late licences in the streets the city forgot about for forty years.
The name is an estate agent’s invention from the early 1990s and everybody knows it. Before that this was simply the top end of town — Oldham Street had been Manchester’s main shopping street until the Arndale Centre opened in 1975 and killed it dead.
Twenty years of empty shops and cheap rent followed, which is exactly the condition in which interesting things grow.
What it is now
Roughly the grid bounded by Piccadilly, Ancoats, Shudehill and the Arndale — narrow streets of Victorian warehouses, three or four storeys, most of them originally for the textile trade.
Record shops. Piccadilly Records is one of the best in the country and has been since 1978. Eastern Bloc has a history that runs directly into the Haçienda story. Vinyl Exchange does secondhand.
Coffee. Manchester’s independent coffee scene is concentrated here and is genuinely serious.
Bars. Small, dark, and often unmarked. Late licences here run later than anywhere else in the centre.
Vintage and independent retail across Tib Street, Oldham Street and Thomas Street.
Street art, most of it around Stevenson Square, where the walls and the public toilets are used as a rotating outdoor gallery by the Outhouse project.
The film location
The streets here have played 1960s New York several times, most visibly in Captain America: The First Avenger, which shot on Dale Street and Newton Street with period cars and fire escapes added. The brickwork, the height of the buildings and the fire escapes are close enough that it is now a regular booking, and you may find a street closed for a shoot.
The honest bit
It has gentrified, thoroughly. Rents that made it possible are gone, several of the businesses that defined it have closed, and the newer bars are noticeably more expensive and less strange than the ones they replaced.
It is still the most interesting part of central Manchester and by a distance the best place to spend an evening. But the people who tell you it is not what it was in 2005 are not wrong.
Walking it
Start at Afflecks, work up Oldham Street, cut across Thomas Street and Tib Street, and end at Mackie Mayor or carry on into Ancoats.
