Manchester. Home of the bee, Andy Burnham and baggy. A football team everyone loves to hate and another team everyone used to hate. Industrial revolutions and warehouse projects. It’s the second city that could. It’s a cultural behemoth that has, admittedly, seen better days on that front, but still manages to pop out an Aitch or a 1975 when it wants to.
It cannot be doubted that the city has its own character and charm. But it also has a unique crapness that perhaps no other place in the uk has, best embodied in the party district overrun with chintzy themed bars known as the Northern Quarter.
My terrible superiority complex as a Londoner is ingrained. It’s a tribalism informed by, as it always is, skewed ‘facts’: London is the epicentre, the birthplace of all that is cool, with Manchester limply trailing behind.
London has its own centres of cringe, of course, from the ballpit caves of Shoreditch to Camden Market, where you might spot Eating with Tod and his lobotomised grin, covered in gravy, tearing some poor unsuspecting mozzarella stick asunder. But the Northern Quarter is special. It’s so derided by locals that they even make fun of it on Coronation Street.
As the sort of guy who won’t go to a pub unless there’s a memorial portrait behind the bar of an old man who died there, I felt I needed to find out what was going on. Like all snobbish authentocrats, I find the idea of others enjoying themselves with fun and games completely bilious. The Northern Quarter and its wincingly awful themed watering holes are anathema to me. So I travelled there on a Friday night to embark on a ‘cringe crawl’, and get to the heart of what makes this part of ‘Mann-eh’ so mortifying, one parodical cocktail at a time.
My first stop is Definitely Maybe, the Oasis-themed bar in the basement of historic shopping emporium Afflecks. At the time of my visit, the Gallaghers were blasting through their reunion tour dates at Wembley Stadium, a brief Porsche-stop away from the north London castles in which they chose to live long ago. I open a large metal door adorned with the band’s logo, and find a dusty old staircase leading into a corridor filled with beer barrels and driftwood detritus. It quickly becomes apparent that I’ve entered through the back entrance by mistake.
Around the front, though, I get another shock: a young woman is sitting in a small booth with a laptop and a card machine. She tells me it’s £5 entry. I tell her the back door is unlocked and I was just rooting around in the bar’s bowels like Indiana Jones. She tells me it’s not her fault.
Definitely Maybe is effectively a gift shop with a bar in it. It is, of course, blasting Oasis through the speakers at deafening volumes, and playing the accompanying music videos on giant plasma screens. It has the strange aroma of terrible northern European pizza, the sort of thing you get to quell the hangover sickness on a Moravian stag do. They serve juicy flatbreads here along with some other anonymous bar snacks. But I’m not here to eat.
