Bar-room brawl

Drinking

Nov 24th 2005 MANCHESTER
From The Economist print edition

How a city fell in and out of love with drink

MANY British towns have a street or a neighbourhood packed with pubs, bars and nightclubs—a magnet for hedonists that the sober and the over-30 tend to avoid, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. Manchester has four such areas within a square mile. Such excess is appropriate in a city that, more than ten years ago, pioneered a boozy development strategy that has since been widely emulated. But Manchester's enthusiasm for drink now seems less like high spirits and more like a ruinous addiction.

Alcohol and its ill effects are now the salient “doorstep issues” in local politics, according to Marc Ramsbottom, a Liberal Democrat councillor. That is partly because of the 2003 Licensing Act, the most important parts of which came into force this week. The Act sweeps away fixed closing times, making it easier for drinking dens to stay open later. It is opposed by the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, by most newspapers and by 62% of the general public, according to a recent poll for the Times. In Manchester, though, the Act has merely sharpened opposition to the drink trade. Resentment runs deep.

The city council took the stopper out of the bottle in the mid-1990s. Gingerly at first, and then with gusto, it encouraged clubs and bars to open in deserted warehouses and shops. Such sites were plentiful: in common with other northern towns, Manchester's heart had been torn out by the departure of the textile industry. The hope was that alcohol would fuel a new, “24-hour” city, kick-starting the urban economy and luring residents and more sober business.

To begin with, the plan seemed to work well. “When I opened, this was a dark, dingy street with no lighting and buggered pavements,” says Andrew O'Dwyer, who owns a bar and nightclub in a now-buzzing area. Thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr O'Dwyer and the IRA, which in 1996 detonated a bomb in a particularly ugly corner of the city, Manchester began to smarten itself up. Retailers have flocked to the city centre: between 2002 and the end of next year, Manchester is expected to add a million square feet of retail space.

The problem is that the city is increasingly sodden with drink. Manchester's bars and clubs can accommodate more than 125,000 drinkers, and often pull in more than half that number. A combination of low prices, pushed down by stiff competition, and rising levels of disposable income has had the expected effect on drinking habits. The nation as a whole is imbibing more: the average Briton consumes 17% more than he did in 1995, even as Americans and many Continental Europeans have cut back on the bottle (see chart). Over-indulgence is compounded by the way Britons like to drink: noisily, in large groups and in public.

Manchester's legions of drinkers are sometimes policed by as few as 50 officers. Such an imbalance is not unusual in a British city, though it is no less inadequate for that. Last year, some 836,000 English and Welsh adults were attacked by strangers, most of whom were drunk at the time, according to the British Crime Survey. That is a 7% increase on the 1997 level.
Drunken punch-ups are more noticeable because many other kinds of criminality have declined. Overall crime has fallen by 35% in the past eight years.

But the 24-hour city's biggest problem is that it proved such a success. Sober folk flocked to it, just as the early 1990s boosters predicted. In 1991, only about 1,000 people lived in the centre of Manchester. Some 15,000 do so today, according to the city council. As a hedonistic playground came to be seen by an increasing number of Mancunians as a residential back yard, conflict became inevitable.

“We brought the area up, people moved in, and then they started to complain about the noise,” complains Mr O'Dwyer. “And the odd thing is, I have yet to see an advertisement for a city-centre flat that does not mention the vibrant night-life.”

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.