Ask any Manchester local what they think of the Printworks and you’ll get one of two answers. Either it’s a soulless chain-restaurant hellscape that represents everything wrong with modern city centres, or it’s actually fine, it does what it does, and people need to stop being snobs about it. Both positions have merit. Neither is completely honest. The Printworks is more complicated than either camp admits, and its story — from newspaper printing works to Manchester’s most divisive entertainment complex — is worth telling properly.
What It Was: The Printing Years
The building at Withy Grove has been associated with printing since the 1870s. The Daily Mirror’s northern editions were printed here. So were copies of the Manchester Evening News and various other Thomson Organisation titles. At its peak, the printing works employed hundreds of people and the presses ran around the clock. If you were in the city centre late at night in the 1970s and 80s, you could hear them — a low mechanical rumble from behind the walls on Withy Grove.
Printing moved out in the 1980s as the industry consolidated and new production facilities were built outside city centres. The building sat empty. This was the story of a lot of Manchester’s commercial buildings in that era — the industrial purpose disappeared and nobody knew what to do with the shell that remained. Some became car parks. Some became nightclubs. Some just rotted.
The Printworks building was too big and too central to ignore. It sits between Exchange Square and the Arndale, in the middle of one of the most heavily trafficked pedestrian routes in the city. Something was going to happen to it. The question was what.
The Conversion: Entertainment Complex
Richardson Developments bought the building and converted it into an entertainment complex, which opened in November 2000. The concept was simple: gut the industrial interior, create a covered street with restaurants, bars, and a cinema, and make it a destination for people who wanted a night out without the uncertainty of wandering between separate venues in the rain.
The architectural conversion is actually impressive, whatever you think of what’s inside it. The main atrium is enormous — a long covered street with a glass roof and the original steel structure visible above. It feels like a Victorian market hall crossed with an American shopping mall. The scale is genuinely striking when you walk in for the first time. There’s a reason film crews occasionally use it as a location — it looks dramatic.
What went inside it was deliberately mass-market. The cinema (originally a Vue, later an Odeon) was the anchor tenant. Around it: chain restaurants, chain bars, a nightclub, and various entertainment concepts. The target audience was clear from day one. This wasn’t aimed at people who seek out independent restaurants and craft cocktail bars. This was aimed at people who want to park once, eat somewhere familiar, see a film, and maybe have a drink afterwards. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what the food-obsessed, independent-minded part of Manchester wanted to hear.
What’s Actually In There Now
Let’s be specific, because the Printworks gets criticised in vague terms that don’t always match reality. The current tenants include a Nando’s, a Hollywood Bowl, the Odeon cinema, a handful of bars, and various other food and entertainment operators that rotate with reasonable frequency. The exact lineup changes — units open and close, concepts come and go — but the general character has been consistent for twenty-five years: mainstream, accessible, chain-dominated.
The cinema is good. Odeon IMAX in the Printworks is one of the better screens in Manchester, and going to see a blockbuster there on opening night has genuine energy. The Hollywood Bowl is fine if you like bowling, which enough people do. The bars are the bars — they serve drinks at city-centre prices to people who are primarily there for the atmosphere rather than the cocktail list.
The food is what it is. If you’re looking for culinary ambition, you’re in the wrong building and you probably know that already. But the brief was never culinary ambition. The brief was somewhere to eat before the cinema or after bowling that’s reliable, quick, and won’t ruin your evening. By that standard, it works.
Friday and Saturday Night: The Carnage
Here’s where the Printworks earns its reputation. On Friday and Saturday nights, particularly from about 9pm onwards, the Printworks transforms into something quite specific. The bars fill up. The noise level rises. Groups of twenty-somethings in going-out clothes pour through the doors. The atmosphere shifts from ‘family entertainment complex’ to ‘pre-club drinking zone’ with remarkable speed.
The Printworks at midnight on a Saturday is loud, crowded, occasionally messy, and absolutely not pretending to be anything it isn’t. This is big-night-out Manchester. This is the city’s mainstream nightlife economy operating at full capacity. The drinks are strong, the music is loud, and the queue for Nando’s at 11pm is a phenomenon that future sociologists will study with fascination.
Is it sophisticated? No. Is it fun? That depends entirely on your age, your expectations, and how many drinks you’ve had. At twenty-two, the Printworks on a Saturday night is a perfectly good time. At thirty-five, it’s an assault on the senses. At forty-five, it’s a nature documentary about a species you once belonged to. The Printworks doesn’t age with you, and it’s not supposed to.
The Stag Do Economy
Manchester is one of the UK’s premier stag and hen do destinations, and the Printworks is ground zero for a significant portion of that trade. It’s purpose-built for large groups who need to stay together. Everything’s in one building. Nobody gets lost. You can eat, drink, bowl, and watch a film without ever going outside. For a stag organiser trying to keep fifteen people in the same place, the Printworks is a logistical godsend.
The stag economy is worth a lot of money to Manchester. These groups aren’t just spending in the Printworks — they’re booking hotels, they’re eating breakfast somewhere, they’re getting taxis, they’re buying tat from the tourist shops. The Printworks is the hub that keeps them in the city centre and spending. If you’re a city planner looking at economic impact, the Printworks is doing its job magnificently.
If you’re a local who happens to walk through the Printworks at 10pm on a Saturday when three separate stag parties are in full cry, your perspective may differ. The matching t-shirts. The inflatable accessories. The chanting. It’s a lot. But it’s also honest — these are people having a good time in a place designed for people having a good time. The Printworks doesn’t pretend to be anything else, and there’s something almost admirable about that consistency.
Why Locals Mock It
Manchester’s cultural self-image is built on independence, authenticity, and doing things differently. The city that gave us Factory Records, the Hacienda, the Royal Exchange Theatre, and the Manchester International Festival is proud of its cultural credentials. The Printworks — a covered mall full of chain restaurants — doesn’t fit that narrative. It feels like it could be in any city. It feels corporate. It feels like the opposite of what Manchester is supposed to be about.
The criticism is understandable but slightly unfair. Not every building in the city needs to be a cultural statement. Not every night out needs to be a experience. Not every meal needs to be cooked by someone who sources their ingredients from a named farm. Manchester has all of those things in abundance. It also has the Printworks, which serves a different purpose for a different audience, and that’s fine.
There’s also a class element to the mockery that’s worth acknowledging. The people who mock the Printworks tend to be the people who can afford to eat at Erst and drink at Jane Eyre. The people who use the Printworks are often people on tighter budgets who want a decent night out without spending eighty quid on dinner. Chain restaurants exist because they offer predictable quality at predictable prices. That’s not a failure of imagination — it’s a rational economic choice. Sneering at it is easy but not particularly kind.
Does It Actually Serve a Purpose?
Yes. Several purposes, actually.
First, it absorbs a massive amount of nightlife traffic that would otherwise be competing for space in other parts of the city centre. The Printworks acts as a containment zone for mainstream nightlife, which means the Northern Quarter, Deansgate Locks, and other areas are less crowded than they would be without it. Whether that’s an intentional design feature or a happy accident is debatable, but the effect is real.
Second, it’s an all-weather venue in a city where it rains constantly. Manchester’s outdoor dining and drinking culture has improved enormously, but for six months of the year you need somewhere covered. The Printworks provides that for thousands of people every week. The covered atrium means you can move between bars and restaurants without getting soaked, which in Manchester is not a trivial consideration.
Third, it’s accessible in a way that some of Manchester’s more fashionable venues aren’t. You don’t need to know which unmarked door to knock on. You don’t need to have booked three weeks in advance. You don’t need to understand the wine list or the cocktail menu. You just walk in. There’s no dress code worth speaking of, no doorman judging your trainers, no sense that you need to be a certain kind of person to be welcome. In a city where some of the newer openings can feel exclusive by design, the Printworks is aggressively inclusive.
The Refurb Question
There have been periodic rumours about a major Printworks refurbishment or repositioning. The building is now twenty-five years into its current incarnation, and the entertainment landscape has changed. Cinema attendance patterns shifted after COVID. The restaurant chains that anchor the building face their own challenges. The Printworks will need to evolve at some point, and what it evolves into will be interesting.
Some people want it to go upmarket — independent restaurants, a food hall, better bars, cultural spaces. That might work for the building but would eliminate the thing the Printworks actually does, which is serve the mainstream. Other people want it to double down on entertainment — more experiential stuff, escape rooms, VR, immersive events. That seems more likely and more in keeping with the building’s DNA.
Whatever happens, the building itself will survive. It’s too big, too central, and too structurally impressive to go unused. The question is whether the next version of the Printworks will serve Manchester as effectively as the current one, mess and all.
The Honest Verdict
The Printworks is not the best thing in Manchester. It’s not the worst thing either. It’s a large, mainstream entertainment complex that does exactly what it was designed to do — provide a covered, convenient, accessible space for people who want a standard night out. It does that well. The cinema is good. The bowling is fine. The bars are functional. The food is predictable in a way that can be either reassuring or depressing depending on your mood.
If you’re a food writer or a cultural commentator, the Printworks gives you nothing to write about. If you’re twenty-three and organising your mate’s birthday, it gives you everything you need in one building. Both of these things are true at the same time, and the inability to hold both truths simultaneously is what makes the Printworks such a divisive topic.
Manchester needs its independent restaurants, its craft cocktail bars, its experimental music venues, and its cultural institutions. It also needs somewhere for a hundred thousand people a week to have a perfectly adequate night out without overthinking it. The Printworks is that place. Love it or hate it, it works. And if you find yourself there at midnight on a Saturday, standing in the Nando’s queue next to a stag party from Wolverhampton, just lean into it. You’re part of the Printworks now. Resistance is futile.
