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Buildings, new restaurants and 'We'll Meet Again'

13/4/2025

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I was doing some research the other day and I had no idea that the writers of one of the most famous British songs of all time were Mancunian. Ross Parker and Hughie Charles were the team behind ‘We’ll Meet Again’, the forces and people’s favourite wartime song and performed by  Vera Lynn of course. I’m going to do more digging about the composers who also scored a hit with ‘There’ll Always Be An England’.
 
For foodies three excellent restaurants have opened in the city centre. Winsome is very British in style (here’s the menu) from the superb chef Shaun Moffat, big portions too and is at 74 Princess Street. Pip is modern British from another local and excellent chef in Mary-Ellen McTeague, elegant food this one with the menu yet to be posted online but the fish pie is excellent. It sits on Blackfriars Street in the old Renaissance Hotel, now the Treehouse Hotel.  Then there’s Bruco in Ancoats on Murray Street with, I suppose, one would call, modern Italian and a coolly and beautifully simple dining space (here’s the menu).
 
Robert de Niro anyone? He wants to be involved with the new towering giant of Manchester’s growing skyline. This is Viadux Two, the 243m (that’s 807ft in old money) high residential block that will somehow be crammed in the already jammed spot next to Deansgate-Castlefield Station and Beetham Tower. This will the third tallest tower in the UK and easily the highest outside London, given that at present the highest tower outside London is South Tower at nearby Deansgate Square at 201m (659ft).
 
Viadux Two will include a high-end (literally) restaurant, 160-bed five-star hotel, and 452 luxury branded residences. The entire building will be operated by the American hospitality brand Nobu part-owned by Mr De Niro. The tower will be designed by Simpson Haugh, Manchester’s go-to tower designing practice. Here’s gentle criticism of the repeated use of one designer back before the Nobu connection.
 
Also here’s a short Instagram video of a ride past Strangeways Prison with in the text a bit of history. And here's another one about the mad monsters in Salford.

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William Mitchell's mad concrete monsters

8/4/2025

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This is Robert Waterhouse writing on 12 June 1967 in The Guardian the year these beasts appeared. Clearly Salford students were well up on classical allusion.

‘At the entrance to the inner square of Salford Technical College three concrete figures stand guard. They link the solid, functional north-west wing with the more elegant, sculptural lecture theatre. They are seen as easily from the main road as from a third-floor teaching room. They are of Florentine size, though the students have understood their more primitive nature and christened them the Three Aphrodites - Urania, the heavenly one. Genetrex, the earth mother, and Pome, purveyor of lust.

‘To Willam Mitchell, their creator, they are simply decorative objects, a landscaping commission which he completed in ten days, casting each figure on site straight from the mixer into four or five polyurethane moulds at the low approximate cost of £4,000. Mitchell's gay, gargantuan objects were included in the architects' contract for the college; it was they who suggested to Mitchell that he should work on three figures. They also felt that the large end wall of the first floor concourse needed decoration, but they couldn't afford to allow far this in their estimates.
‘Incongruous in Salford? The Victorians loved extravaganzas in the heart of their industrial miasmas. Here are worthy successors, and in much better planned surroundings.’

I love these monsters. Lots of people despise them. At first sight they seem as dated as footage from Woodstock with beads, mini-skirts and headbands. But get up close, walk around them, peep into their nooks and crannies, rub your hands over their folds and bulges, and there’s a certain sensual attractive horror to them. Mitchell deliberately mixed up the colour scheme, the types of concrete and even included bits of mosaic.

He was naughty though in offering no interpretation of what they might mean (his title was 'Untitled') although we know he was having an 'Aztec moment' as you can tell from the style? Was he teasing us with a work that subsequently he knew might sum up urban alienation? Probably not but the good news is that in 2012 the monsters were Grade II listed.  
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Zurich, music,  Corrie & love ain’t easy or is it?

2/4/2025

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It was a music tour and a man in a cap and in his mid-forties was telling me in perfect English how he’s from Zurich and called Etienne.

He said: “I’m here for this tour and it’s my birthday so my partner has treated me. I love Manchester music. It’s always talked to me. She’s also got tickets for the Coronation Street tour tomorrow”.

I said: “You like Coronation Street? A bit of a contrast to Zurich I imagine.”

Etienne said: “I like how it depicts the life here, I mean in Manchester, or I suppose it does. I love the accents and how people say things. I like the humour. I also like how The Smiths had the Coronation Street sign over their heads with that famous picture of Salford Lads Club on The Queen is Dead album.”

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One of these places is Zurich and one is Coronation Street
Before I could say anything, he smiled and held up a hand. “Oh I know it’s not the same Coronation Street as on the album.” Etienne was proud of his Manchester knowledge.

“It’s not far away from the original,” I said. “I interviewed the original script writer Tony Warren many years ago. He said he’d based his first scripts on Archie Street which is the same area of Salford, a place called Ordsall. But I don’t watch the soap. I watched it for a while ages ago in the eighties when it was more like a sitcom, it was very light-hearted. I’m pretty sure it didn’t accurately depict life here then nor does it do now probably. Anyway, isn’t it supposed to be all issues-based these days?”

Etienne laughed. He said: “There is a lot of that.” He put on a stern tone and in a very convincing generic North Western accent recited:  “If you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme please call…” He laughed and said: “That happens after almost every programme.”

He paused: “I believe I am the only Corrie, as you say I think, fan in Switzerland.”

I said: “Etienne, that would be difficult to prove that but I’m very prepared to believe you.”

“You know,” he said, “this weekend break with first Manchester music and then a tour of Coronation Street will be one of finest times of my life.”

His partner overhearing this laughed and gave him a hug.

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Etienne is in the cap to the right of the man with the sunglasses and a cap
Music tours are very joyous things. All ages and all nationalities come along. Mostly they come for the famous eighties and nineties bands but get dragged in by other music too.

On a recent tour there was a Columbian and a Brazilian women, both previously unknown to each other along for the ride. They were both mid-twenties and both loved the eighties and nineties bands. But then they loved all the music.

The Columbian danced to every intro I played and clapped her hands in delight to a complete range of wildly disparate tunes and bands from Love Will Tear Us Apart through Relight My Fire, Supersonic, I Am The Resurrection, There Is A Light and Never Gonna Give You Up. Others started involuntarily joining in.


The two Latina women were friends by the end of the tour and went off to lunch together.   
 
When I started the Manchester music tours I’d expected lots of people my age to respond, or even those a generation younger, but when twenty-something Americans, as happened this month, start singing along to the Buzzcocks this is clearly not the case.

As stated above the tours have pan-generational appeal.

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The Smiths drag more music fans to Manchester than any other band
There can be dark shades to the tours. When I mentioned to a mid-fifties German couple who’d paid for a private tour how people can get married in The Smiths’ room in Salford Lads Club, they got excited and simultaneously exclaimed: “Let’s do that!”

I deadpanned that I might have to get to know them better first.

They explained their reaction in an unexpected way.

Or rather the woman did, saying: “We love our kids  but we both hate our ex-spouses.”

“They are not ex yet,” said the man, “we are waiting for our divorces, then we can get married.”

“But when that happens we’ll come back and get married in The Smiths’ room,” said the woman ecstatically.

“Oh yes,” he boomed just as passionately and high-fived her saying: “And that will be us free at last.”

These were clearly a wealthy couple. They travelled ten times a year to watch gigs all across Europe and the globe. Apparently their exes had hated gigging which to quote Guy Garvey of Elbow had clearly become Grounds For Divorce.


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The Smiths' room at Salford Lads Club
Earlier the tours that weekend had delivered a sweeter story while taking people around the mighty Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel, formerly the Refuge Assurance Building from the late 1890s and extended in the early twentieth century.

I always ask if anybody in the group had worked in the building before the founding company left in 1987.

David and Pat had.

They’d met at the Refuge in 1961 when she was 15 and he was 16. They’d starting flirting with each other as soon as they’d met and before they were twenty they’d married. They had now amassed upwards of 54 years of companionship and brought up children along the way. They appeared almost extravagantly in love as though the years hadn’t touched their affections.   

Conditions were different back when they’d started. They both talked about how women were paid much lower wages (not exactly an extinct practice) than men even though as David said: “She was much cleverer than me.” And of course married women had to leave work if they got pregnant. The state believed that motherhood had become their job whether they wanted to give up work or not.

With a grin David said: “It was great at the Refuge, there was a 10 to one ratio of females to males. Great odds that.”

And then he added: “Why would anybody want to work from home? Especially if you’re young. How do you meet people?”

“Online,” said a member of the group in a tone dryer than the Atacama.

Next time: Steak, Spanish lads & Norwegian chocolate

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David and Pat and the group in the Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
There's sixteen pages of music tour in the new edition of my guidebook. You can buy it here. There's a picture of a happy customer from Switzerland below.
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