From The Times
February 11, 2006

Manchester's village people lose out to footballers' wives

By Russell Jenkins

HAPPY hour now lasts all day, all week even, in the bars lining Manchester’s Canal Street but the mood is bleak in the city’s gay quarter.

The gay village, an ultra chic enclave of bars and restaurants that burst into life in the 1980s, became the most celebrated and copied area of its kind.

But now the profits are drying up as the pink pound moves confidently into more fashionable “straight” parts of town. Internet dating and a decline in homophobia have eroded the need for a “gay ghetto” and left behind a set of struggling bars filled with raucous hen parties. The Northern Quarter, the artists’ district, is Manchester’s new hotspot.

Roger Barberis, who manages the city centre on behalf of Manchester City Council, said: “Ten years ago the village was the height of fashion. Now it is Peter Street and Deansgate Locks, where people like to mingle with the footballers and footballers’ wives. This is new competition that the village has had to respond to.

“Gay men and lesbian women are also more confident about going somewhere else. Ten years ago they had to confine themselves to the village. That’s had an impact.”

Ruth Hunt, a senior policy officer with Stonewall, the gay rights organisation, said that this mainstream acceptance of gay nightlife was a regional phenomenon. “That might be happening in London or Manchester but I don’t think it’s so true of Cardiff.

“Overall there’s been an increase in tolerance but also in intolerance — just look at all the fuss over Simon Hughes.”

In its heyday Manchester’s gay village drew so much cash into the city that every major settlement from Newcastle and Huddersfield down to Cardiff wanted one of their own.

In the late 1990s the television drama series Queer As Folk made bars such as Manto and Via Fossa popular party destinations for everyone. Hen parties were followed by single straight men and the annual Mardi Gras attracted thousands of sightseers.

Drinkers in Velvet flirted on top of luminous fish tanks and watched the QVC home shopping channel in the lavatories.

Now the increasing popularity of cruising for partners online, whether on Gaydar or other specialist websites, is minimising the need for an expensive night on the town. There are too many bars trying to attract a diminishing number of customers and the big breweries are shipping out, leaving the independents to scrap it out.

In recent months businesses have been changing hands at a bewildering pace. The Slug and Lettuce has made way for Queer, Bar 38 to axm. Most telling of all has been Peter Dalton’s decision to sell Manto, which was the first fashionable gay venue to open up on the street and which recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. Mr Dalton believes that the quarter’s profitability peaked five or six years ago.

The Village Business Association, which is the collective voice of bar, club and restaurant owners, concluded in a recent synopsis of its woes that oversupply is likely to continue. “Competition is likely to become fiercer and fiercer,” their report suggests.

A bar-hopper making his way up Canal Street to Manto is greeted by a an enormous banner advertising its buy-one-get-one-free drinks offer “on all days every day”.

Further up the street Queers offers a “Something for the Weekend” promotion: more free drinks. One bar owner complained that a rival has been offering three drinks for the price of one.

Peter Beswick, who runs The Rembrandt Hotel, a gay pub that traces its history back to the 1940s, says that profitability is running 20 to 25 per cent down on its peak years.

In his gentle, avuncular way he lists his business ailments in terms of importance: 33 licensed premises struggling to make a living in a small area, competition from elsewhere in the city, gay villages springing up “from Huddersfield to Chester”, customers embracing the anonymity of the net, the wrong kind of crowd and even disputes with local residents over noise.

He has banned hen parties from staying at the hotel, complaining that they are more trouble than they are worth, setting off fire extinguishers and wrecking rooms. And he abominates the notoriety that the Queer As Folk series attracted. “People think the pink pound is a way of printing money. It is not,” he said. “Friday nights used to be a really good night. Now they are terrible.

“Our profitability peaked five or six years ago. Over the last three years we have found it tougher than it has ever been. We asked the council to put a cap on the number of licensed premises because we cannot afford any more in the area.”

In Clone Zone, the “only gay shop in the village”, the man behind the counter complains that customers are now buying their S&M gear from high street chains. But, grabbing a DVD from a surprised middle-aged customer in collar and tie, he says: “These are flying off the shelves”. The DVD, which is called Bootstrap, shows a bare-bottomed man in cowboy chaps.