A guide to Manchester, the UK’s northern powerhouse with an eye for creativity

Travel

A spirit of rebellious creativity infuses the northern city, with old factories turned into artists’ studios and a unique sense of style on display throughout.

ByDaniel Stables

Photographs ByToby Mitchell

Published February 6, 2024

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

“It’s fantastically therapeutic,” says Bhaggie Patel, ceramic artist and co-founder of Manchester’s Imprints of Earth ceramics studio. “Sometimes I’ll be sitting at the wheel and I’m so engrossed in what I’m doing, I don’t realise it’s turned dark outside.” Bhaggie is leading me in a one-to-one throwing class, teaching me how to turn an amorphous lump of clay into something useful, maybe even beautiful: a pot, perhaps, or a mug or bowl.

As I look down, though — at my hands caked in clay, my shoe twitching unassuredly on the foot pedal, and the gloopy grey mess spinning sadly before me on the wheel  — ‘therapeutic’ is not the word that immediately comes to mind. Bhaggie is patient with me, however, and I soon begin to understand what she means. I stop overthinking, and the minutes melt away along with the worries of the day, replaced by a state of flow: complete immersion in an act at once wholesome, practical and creative.

“Any creative hobby can have huge physical and mental health benefits,” Bhaggie says. “It reduces stress and anxiety, increases positive emotions, and helps with problem solving. It gives you a sense of control and pride in whatever it is you’re making.”

Bhaggie understands more than most the healing power of arts and crafts. A former social worker, she set up Imprints of Earth with her daughter Shakti after the sudden death of her husband, Nitin, in 2018. The shelves around us are stacked with her creations: smoke-fired vases, mottled in red, black and grey; Japanese-style raku teapots, their surfaces swirled with horsehair and feathers which create unique, ethereal patterns during the firing process. “Making ceramics is an amazing metaphor for life: learning when to let go, knowing what you can and can’t control, and celebrating the beauty of imperfection,” she says.

Imprints of Earth is one of 20 shop-studios housed within the Manchester Craft and Design Centre, in the city’s artsy Northern Quarter. Bhaggie holds classes and workshops on request; other upcoming classes, advertised on a wall poster, promise visitors the opportunity to make the perfect souvenir: a leather purse, a glass sun catcher, or a silver bangle. Classes are also advertised at The Cyan Studio, a few doors down from Bhaggie’s workshop, where artist Victoria Glover teaches visitors the art of cyanotype, laying foraged twigs and leaves on chemically treated paper to create gorgeous blue and white photographic patterns.

The centre sits in the impressive surrounds of the former Smithfield Market, a handsome building dating back to 1873. As I step out of Bhaggie’s studio into the atrium, sunlight beams through the glass roof, catching the window display of a jewellery studio and spilling a gem box of rainbowed light onto the terracotta-tiled floor.  

The same colour palette adorns the shopfront opposite Bhaggie’s, belonging to Nicole Broad, aka The Fruit Moth — a fashion designer whose vibrant, upcycled vintage designs have won her a collaboration with high-street giants Uniqlo. Nicole’s native Manchester has always inspired her work, beginning with the floral bucket hats that were her early trademark. “People here are so confident in what they wear,” she says.

Nicole also thinks it’s an unbeatable place to be creative. “It’s one of the best cities for an artist or designer. It’s a big city but feels like a tiny community,” she says. Like all of the units in the Craft and Design Centre, Nicole’s space is both workshop and shop, with everyone welcome to walk in, watch her at work, and chat to her about her designs. “Being able to go into a studio and see someone making something — that absolutely adds value,” she says. 

Nicole is a relative newcomer to the centre, having started her business during the lockdowns of the pandemic. I want to get a feel for how the scene and the city have changed over the years, so I head downstairs to meet the longest-serving resident, ceramicist Lee Page Hanson, who’s been working here for 24 years. 

“I used to work from a studio in Ancoats, an old industrial area of cotton mills not far from here,” says Lee. “Back then, in the 1990s, it was pretty rough and ready; I’d get out of the studio and onto the safety of a bus as soon as possible. It couldn’t be more different now — those old cotton mills are bars, art galleries and luxury apartments.”

“There are loads of classes around Manchester now, too. I often see people in their 20s and 30s doing pottery classes and the like, instead of just going out drinking or sitting around watching TV.” 

The table in Lee’s studio bears the earthbound signs of work and craft: rows of brushes and knives, and decades’ worth of dry streaked clay and paint. All around us, the walls are hung with the end result: vases and bowls ornamented with colourful geometric patterns, and ceramic tiles depicting vibrantly painted toucans and sparrows.

“We see plenty of famous faces too,” Lee adds. “Lemn Sissay [poet, broadcaster and Pinter Prize-winning playwright] came in the other day and bought a fridge magnet.” This is typical of Manchester, a place at once glittery and down-to-earth, gritty and creative; a big city with the intimacy of a small town, where everyone knows everyone and half of them are reaching for the stars. I experienced an unexpected brush with celebrity myself that very morning, when Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr wandered across my field of vision as I admired a statue of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in St Peter’s Square.

New beginnings

The creativity and craftsmanship of Manchester’s designers and makers infuse all parts of the city’s life. Leaving the Craft and Design Centre behind, I explore the surrounding Northern Quarter, long known as Manchester’s most alternative neighbourhood. Vibrant murals light up every square and street corner. The outer walls of Affleck’s, a legendary indoor fashion and music market, are adorned with mosaics by artist Mark Kennedy depicting local icons as diverse as Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover, footballer Eric Cantona and Warburtons Toastie bread. 

Even the street signs are unique: blue and white and in a stylised typeface. The font is called Cypher, and was designed especially for the Northern Quarter by local artist Tim Rushton. One such sign announces Tib Street, where, on cast iron tablets beneath my feet, set into the pavement, the same font spells out a poem by Lemn Sissay entitled ‘Flags’. “Pavement cracks are the places where poets pack warrior words,” reads one line. Up above, terracotta parrots roost on the second-storey window sills of the redbrick Victorian buildings — a nod to the street’s former life as a hub for pet shops. 

As I wander, I see evidence everywhere for Nicole’s claim that Mancunians have a distinctive sense of style, too — there are as many mod haircuts, paisley scarves and neon bucket hats to be seen today as in the city’s ‘Madchester’ heyday of the 1980s and 1990s. But more than anything, it’s about the attitude; anything looks great when worn with cast-iron confidence. Consider Liam Gallagher, who has attained fashion-icon status by dressing like a Norwegian trawler fisherman for the last 30 years. The prevalence of Gallagher’s beloved parka in Mancunian fashion has a practical element, of course — Manchester is famously rainy — but it has been elevated to a fashion form by brands like Private White VC, which still uses traditional manufacturing techniques and local materials in its original 19th-century factory on the banks of the River Irwell. Visits to the factory to meet the highly trained makers can be arranged on request. 

Mancunian craftspeople are also making their mark on the city’s blooming culinary scene. My walking tour has made me hungry, so I head south of the Northern Quarter to bistro Higher Ground for a bite to eat. The interior is typical Manchester — modern and stylish but with nods to the industrial past including polished concrete floors and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. I order a burnt honey tart — the honey courtesy of beekeepers in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton — and it arrives on a beautiful plate created by Frida Cooper, a ceramicist working in Pollard Yard, a hub of converted shipping containers in Ancoats. Even the table I’m sitting at was made by local artisans — Easy Peel, who carved it from a London plane tree salvaged from the entrance of a Stockport shopping centre. 

By the time I emerge from the restaurant, the sun’s going down but Manchester’s art and design scene shows no sign of winding down with it. In the Northern Quarter, poetry and philosophy bookshop Anywhere Out of the World holds evening life drawing classes, while nearby bar Foundry Project hosts art evenings where you can learn to paint while enjoying a drink under the tutelage of a professional artist. Meanwhile, Islington Mill, a six-storey Georgian redbrick building close to the River Irwell in Salford, is a collection of makers’ studios by day and a venue for music, theatre and performance by night. 

This new role given to Manchester’s historic mill buildings, relics of a time when this was the first industrial city in the world, is a neat symbol of the city’s modern character. Neglected for decades, these former furnaces of industry now house artisan workshops and designers’ studios — erstwhile cathedrals of mass production repurposed as homes for the boutique and one-of-a-kind. George Orwell once described Manchester as “the belly and guts of the nation”. That visceral quality still abides, but modern Manchester demands a more delicate analogy: the painter’s eye, perhaps, the potter’s wheel, or the jeweller’s hands.

(How to spend a day in Manchester, the UK’s northern powerhouse.)

Published in the Jan/Feb 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

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