Northern Quarter

The Northern Quarter is an area of Manchester city centre lying between Piccadilly station, Victoria station and Ancoats, centred on Oldham Street just off Piccadilly Gardens. The district grew up on the back of Manchester's cotton trade: by 1794 the area was already shown as a developed urban district on William Green's map, and through the nineteenth century it filled with textile warehouses, trade buildings and light manufacturing, including umbrella making. Manchester's cotton trade reached its peak in 1912, when eight billion square yards of fabric were manufactured and sold from the city, much of it passing through warehouses in and around this district. Streets including Oldham Street, Tib Street, Thomas Street, Hilton Street, Lever Street, Dale Street and Newton Street still carry low-rise Victorian and Edwardian warehouse buildings from that era. The area also housed Smithfield Market, whose former 1873 fish market building on Oak Street is now home to the Manchester Craft and Design Centre. Oldham Street was a major shopping street until the 1970s, when the opening of the Arndale Centre drew established retailers away and left many buildings empty. From the 1980s onward the district was gradually taken over by independent businesses: Afflecks opened as an indoor alternative market in 1982, and Piccadilly Records relocated to Oldham Street in 1997. Independent record shops, vintage and second-hand clothing stores, cafes and restaurants have since filled the old warehouse units on Oldham Street, Tib Street and Thomas Street. The area also has a long live music history, home to Band on the Wall on Swan Street (recorded as a pub since 1803, a music venue since the 1930s, reopened in 2022 after a 3.5 million pound refurbishment), Night and Day Cafe on Oldham Street (opened 1991) and Matt and Phred's jazz club on Tib Street. Street art is concentrated around Stevenson Square and Tib Street, where murals are curated and rotated by the Outhouse Project. Today the Northern Quarter combines surviving Victorian warehouse architecture with independent shops, galleries, bars, cafes and live music venues, and the wider area appears on a tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Site status.

Photo: Afflecks Palace, Manchester by Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0