It’s been a busy week in Manchester. The Manchester International Festival has given us a preview of our new flagship arts centre Factory International, kicking off a fortnight of music, theatre, food and drink across the city. Pulp and Bastille are swaggering through sets at Castlefield Bowl, while Kiss and Iron Maiden rock the AO Arena.
We started the summer with an all-Mancunian FA Cup final, massive shows from Elton and Coldplay, and my festival, Parklife. But somehow, it just keeps getting better.
You’d be hard pressed to say anyone here in Manchester feels they’ve “levelled up”. We’ve yet to see much evidence that the grand promises of devolution, HS2 and thinly-spread Westminster cash will make much difference to people’s lives. But in one key respect, we in Manchester are leaving London in the dust.
I’ve always said that while the South has all the money, the North has all the fun. I grew up in Manchester, and I’m the region’s night time economy adviser. And the fact is, we’re still mad for it. Mad for music, mad for a late one. We’re even mad for a pint at the local — and it’s much cheaper than you’d get in the capital.
From pubs to clubs and restaurants, Manchester’s hospitality sector has been the engine of the city’s post-Covid recovery.
Year-on-year, we’re in the mix with the likes of Glasgow and Birmingham at the top of the table for growth in the industry. We’ve seen takings begin to match pre-pandemic levels for the first time this year, and the Sunday Times recently crowned Manchester the “night-time capital of the UK”. Although London has a world-leading reputation for its nightlife, it just isn’t keeping up with the sector’s growth in other major cities.
That doesn’t just matter to publicans and restaurateurs — it matters to all of us. The hospitality industry accounts for around one in 10 jobs and five per cent of GDP. Vitally, since the pandemic it has been a key predictor and driver of recovery, with the Office for National Statistics reporting that the sector was responsible for almost half of national growth when the economy was getting back on track in 2021.
That means we all have a stake in a healthy hospitality business across the country. And as many cities struggle to bounce back, it’s worth seriously asking what makes the contrast between the North-West and London so stark.
We all know the elation of a night we never want to end — but too often in London that feeling is cut short
I’m a proud Brit who loves my capital city — and I don’t want to see London languishing in the relegation zone while Manchester sits top of the table.
Our capital constantly ranks last for nightlife among cities in Britain in consumer surveys and industry analyses. This can be passed off as a side-effect of high prices and population density, which means that despite the thousands of establishments in the city, it’s still short on boozers and eateries per capita. But anyone who has been on a night out in London, especially since the pandemic, can see deeper problems lurking in the shadows.
One is that this hub of international finance and tourism — a city that remains a destination of choice for young people getting into the world of work, if they can afford it — shuts early. Bar some pockets of resistance in the outer boroughs and a handful of bars and clubs, London tucks itself in before midnight. We’ve all experienced the elation of a night we never want to end — but too often in London that feeling is cut short by the bells of last orders.
Overzealous (and doubtless overstretched) police and restrictive licensing rules have a huge part to play in this, as shown by Greggs’ recent attempts to secure a 24-hour licence for its Leicester Square branch.
The company secured a few small concessions to its 11pm curfew after reaching an agreement with
Westminster council. But the frustrations it faced, on a site surrounded by venues that thrive on a vibrant night-time culture — bars, clubs, restaurants, casinos and even cinemas — are unbelievable. This isn’t just a licensing problem. It cuts to the heart of London’s increasingly conflicted identity, compounded by demographic changes resulting from so many being priced out of the city centre and a cultural malaise that long preceded the pandemic. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: not enough businesses will pursue later openings if they don’t have the footfall to make them profitable.
A night-time strategy published by Wandsworth council showed the way out of this bind, combining later opening hours for cafes, bars and restaurants, with a range of measures designed to make them viable.
It recommends more outdoor spaces for venues — a sure way to make streets both safer and livelier. Night nurseries, late-night supermarkets and incentives for late-night workers are also part of the package, ensuring the whole community views the dwindling hours in a different way, not just revellers.
Combined with some legislative stimulus — like the business rate reforms going through Parliament — such measures could be a potent pick-me-up for London nightlife.
The precise ingredients of a thing like culture are hard to pin down, hard to measure and easy for local authorities focused on hard data to ignore. But the economic benefits of a night-time culture that matched London’s status would be very tangible indeed.
