There’s a particular kind of smugness that comes with knowing your city produces podcasts that millions of people listen to. Manchester has that in bulk. Steven Bartlett records one of the biggest shows on the planet from here. Peter Crouch has been known to set up shop in Salford. And somewhere in Ancoats, someone with a condenser mic and a grudge against Piccadilly Gardens is uploading episode 47 of a podcast that twelve people listen to religiously.
All of it matters. The big stuff puts Manchester on the map. The small stuff tells you what the city actually sounds like. Here’s where to start.
The Diary of a CEO — Steven Bartlett
You probably already know this one. Steven Bartlett grew up in Moss Side, dropped out of Manchester Metropolitan University, built Social Chain into a company worth hundreds of millions, then became the youngest ever Dragon on Dragons’ Den. His podcast, The Diary of a CEO, has become one of the most downloaded shows on earth — regularly pulling in guests like Sam Altman, Mo Gawdat, and whoever happens to be promoting a book that week.
The Manchester connection runs deeper than just Bartlett’s biography. The show is produced by Flight Studio, based in the city, and there’s a particular quality to how Bartlett interviews that feels distinctly un-London. He’s not trying to be mates with his guests. He’s trying to extract something useful. The episodes on business and psychology tend to be stronger than the celebrity ones. His two-parter with Chris Williamson on modern masculinity got tens of millions of listens for good reason — it was a proper conversation rather than two people performing for each other.
Start with the episode featuring the Huberman Lab’s Andrew Huberman on dopamine, or the one with Matthew Walker on sleep. Both are long but genuinely change how you think about daily habits. Skip the ones that feel like they’re just plugging a Netflix special.
That Peter Crouch Podcast
Technically a BBC Radio 5 Live production, and Crouch himself lives down south, but the show has recorded from MediaCityUK in Salford multiple times, and co-host Chris Stark is a regular in Manchester’s studios. The football connection is obvious — Crouch’s career took him through the Premier League and his stories about dressing rooms, away trips, and the genuinely bizarre world of professional football are brilliant.
The reason it works is that Crouch is funny without trying to be a comedian. His story about being on the England team bus and someone putting on a Phil Collins CD is the kind of thing you end up retelling in the pub. The show dips when it leans too heavily on guest promotion, but when it’s just Crouch, Stark, and Tom Fordyce talking nonsense about football, it’s one of the best listens going.
For Manchester-specific content, find the episodes where they discuss playing at Old Trafford and the Etihad. Crouch’s description of the tunnel at Old Trafford — the low ceiling, the cramped space designed to make visiting teams feel small — is worth the listen alone.
Athletico Mince — Bob Mortimer and Andy Dawson
Bob Mortimer is from Middlesbrough. Andy Dawson is from Hull. Neither lives in Manchester. But Athletico Mince has become so embedded in Northern football culture that claiming it for the city feels reasonable, especially since half the recurring characters seem to be loosely based on people you’d meet in a Deansgate bar at 2am.
If you’ve never listened, this isn’t a football podcast in any normal sense. It’s Bob Mortimer doing characters — a version of Steve Bruce who’s obsessed with gang culture, a paranoid Peter Beardsley, a fictional football manager called Barry Homeowner — interrupted occasionally by actual football chat. It’s surreal, it’s stupid, and it’s one of the funniest things being made in any medium right now.
The Manchester relevance comes through the football culture. Mortimer’s fictional Steve Bruce is forever trying to navigate situations that feel plucked from a night out in the Northern Quarter. Start with any episode from the last year. They don’t really build on each other. You’ll know within ten minutes whether it’s for you.
The Manchester Wire Podcast
This is the proper local one. Manchester Wire has been covering the city’s music, food, and culture scene for years through their website, and the podcast extends that into longer conversations. They interview venue owners, chefs, promoters, and musicians — the people who actually make Manchester work rather than the people who just talk about it on LinkedIn.
The strength is specificity. These aren’t vague conversations about “the Manchester scene.” They’ll spend an hour talking to the person who books bands at YES, or the chef who just opened a six-cover restaurant in Levenshulme, or the promoter trying to keep a grassroots venue alive when the landlord wants to convert it into flats. It’s the kind of granular, on-the-ground coverage that national media never bothers with.
Episodes tend to be 30-45 minutes, which is a relief in a world where every podcast thinks it needs to be three hours long. The back catalogue is worth digging through — their episodes from the pandemic period are a genuine oral history of what Manchester’s independent scene went through.
Manchester Music Podcasts
Given that this city’s entire global identity is built on music, you’d expect the podcast scene to reflect that. It does, though not always in the ways you’d predict.
Clint Boon, the Inspiral Carpets keyboard player turned XS Manchester DJ, has been doing regular podcast episodes that pull from his decades in Manchester music. He’s got stories about the Hacienda, about Madchester, about watching the city’s music scene die and come back repeatedly. He’s also honest about the bits that weren’t great — the drugs, the exploitation, the venues that treated bands like dirt. That honesty makes it worth hearing over yet another rose-tinted Madchester nostalgia trip.
Muddy Knees Manchester focuses on the current grassroots scene — unsigned bands, small venue gigs, the people putting on nights in rooms above pubs. It’s scrappy and lo-fi in production, which somehow makes it feel more authentic than the polished stuff. If you want to know what band to see at The Castle Hotel next Thursday, this is more useful than any algorithm.
For electronic music, the Meat Free collective has put out podcast mixes and discussions about Manchester’s club scene that capture something the mainstream music press consistently misses — the city’s dance music culture didn’t end with the Hacienda. It just stopped being covered by London journalists.
True Crime in Manchester
Manchester has a complicated relationship with true crime content. The city has genuine, serious criminal history — the Moors Murders, the 1996 IRA bombing, gangland violence in the 1990s and 2000s — and not all of it is handled well by podcasters chasing downloads.
The Manchester Evening News has produced podcast series on specific cases that benefit from actual journalism rather than Wikipedia-reading. Their coverage of the Dale Cregan case and the wider gun crime crisis in South Manchester treated the subject with the weight it deserved. It wasn’t entertainment. It was reporting in audio form.
If you’re after something that uses Manchester as a setting without turning real suffering into content, the BBC’s documentary podcasts have covered the Arena bombing with the kind of care and access that independent true crime pods simply can’t match. The 2022 inquiry coverage in particular is essential listening — not because it’s gripping in a entertainment sense, but because it matters.
Be wary of the dozens of true crime podcasts that treat Manchester crime as fodder for dramatic narration. Two Americans reading from a Wikipedia article about Moss Side in the 1990s is not journalism. It’s extraction.
Football Beyond the Big Two
United and City dominate the global conversation, obviously. But the best Manchester football podcasts are often the ones coming from slightly outside that spotlight.
The Talking Reds podcast and The United Stand give you the full-time fan perspective on Manchester United — chaotic, emotional, contradictory, and completely unable to agree on whether the current manager is any good. The Bluemoon Podcast does the same for City, though City fan podcasts have a slightly different energy — there’s always an undercurrent of “we know you think we’re just oil money” defensiveness that makes for interesting listening even if you’re neutral.
Further down the pyramid, FC United of Manchester has inspired podcast content about fan ownership and what happens when supporters actually try to run a football club themselves. It’s not always pretty — the internal politics alone could fill a series — but it’s a story that matters beyond football.
Business and Tech Pods
Manchester’s tech scene has grown fast enough to generate its own podcast ecosystem. The Manchester Tech Festival has produced episodes with founders building companies outside London, and the recurring theme is always the same: cheaper rent, better talent retention, and not having to spend four hours a day on the Tube.
Beyond Bartlett, smaller business podcasts like the Northern Startup podcast cover the specific challenges of building companies in the North — less VC money, fewer networking events, but also less of the performative hustle culture that makes London startup world unbearable. The best episodes are the ones where founders are honest about the things that went wrong, which in Manchester tends to happen more readily than in cities where everyone’s trying to maintain an image.
What’s Missing
For all its strengths, Manchester’s podcast scene has gaps. There’s no definitive architecture podcast about the city, which is mad given the range of buildings here. There’s nothing solid covering Manchester’s food scene in audio format — someone needs to fix that. And the comedy podcast scene, despite the city being home to dozens of working comedians, is surprisingly thin compared to Edinburgh or London.
The other thing Manchester lacks is a proper daily news podcast. The MEN does some audio content, but there’s no equivalent of something like the Monocle daily briefing focused purely on Greater Manchester. Given that the city-region has a population of nearly three million, that’s a gap someone with a microphone and a sense of purpose could fill.
Where to Start
If you’re new to Manchester podcasts, start with The Diary of a CEO for the big production-value stuff, Manchester Wire for the local deep cuts, and Athletico Mince for something that’ll make you laugh on the tram. Between those three, you’ll get a decent picture of what this city sounds like when it’s talking to itself rather than performing for everyone else.
And if you end up bingeing all of them during a week of commutes on the Metrolink, don’t say we didn’t warn you. The Northern line gives you plenty of time.
