Cheetham Hill sits north of the city centre and has functioned as one of Manchester’s primary immigrant arrival neighbourhoods for the best part of 150 years. The Jewish community that established itself here from the 1870s built synagogues, schools, the Manchester Jewish Museum (in a former Spanish and Portuguese synagogue), and a community infrastructure that shaped a significant part of the city’s commercial and cultural life. As that community moved to the suburbs in the second half of the twentieth century, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities moved in. Now it’s one of the most genuinely mixed areas in any English city.
Manchester Jewish Museum
The Manchester Jewish Museum on Cheetham Hill Road is housed in a Grade II listed Victorian synagogue and is one of the better small museums in the city. It covers the history of Manchester’s Jewish community from the 1780s to the present, with genuinely interesting material on the Ashkenazi immigration wave, the community’s role in Manchester’s textile trade, and the dispersal to Prestwich, Whitefield and Salford. It reopened after a major refurbishment in 2021 and is worth an hour if you have any interest in how Manchester actually formed.
The Textile Connection
Cheetham Hill’s wholesale textile trade – concentrated around the Textile Quarter area – is one of the less-celebrated parts of Manchester’s commercial history. The warehouses that line Bury New Road and the surrounding streets were where fabric moved through the city for well over a century. Much of that trade continues, now run by South Asian families who took over from the Jewish merchants who originally built it.
Food and the High Street
Cheetham Hill’s Bangladeshi and Pakistani food is some of the best in the city and almost entirely unknown outside the community. The high street on Cheetham Hill Road has halal butchers, South Asian sweet shops, a few restaurants that serve the community rather than the city centre crowd. The Afghan restaurants that have appeared in recent years are particularly worth knowing about – proper Afghan cooking, nan-e-afghani from a proper tandoor, qorma and mantoo. Not expensive, not on any food blogger’s radar.
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