It's all kicking off in Royton

It’s fast approaching midnight and I’m sitting outside a precinct bar in Royton, watching two men engaged in a somewhat homoerotic embrace. They’ve only just met, but they appear to be telling each other how much they love each other, and there’s a lot of arm touching. This would usually be par for the course, but in this instance I have reasonable cause for concern: one of the men is my 25-year-old editor, Jack, and the other is a middle aged man who is struggling to stand unassisted.

Two months ago the Oldham Chronicle published an article about Royton, a mill town sitting just North of Oldham, just South of Rochdale, shy of the Irk headwater, and by undulating land at the foothills of the South Pennines, according to the town’s uncharacteristically florid Wikipedia entry. The news feature claimed that Royton is a great night out until it all kicks off, and it was titled as follows — Royton: It’s a great night out - until it all kicks off. The Oldham Chronicle has long been my favourite of the medium-town North-West hyper-local rags that it's strongly suggested that I comb through on my commute, but with this article they’d really outdone themselves. In just over 1000 words, they told the story of a town on the turn — a town slowly creeping with “artisan breweries” and “bougie cafe-bars”, where new nightclubs spell an influx of alcohol-fuelled glassing incidents, and where startled residents scuffle out the reach of journalists “before popping hurriedly into PoundBakery”.

But the article, while complete in its own right, was in my eyes missing the sort of hard-hitting journalism that only someone with absolutely no respect for traditional office hours and/or work-life balance could possibly provide. Namely, it was missing someone actually going out in Royton and seeing what the fuss was about. And so I suggested to my editor Jack that I go on a Big Night Out in Royton, to find out whether the town was really the party mecca that the papers would have you believe, and whether its new-found nightlife — and the rising popularity of a particularly infamous club called Bono — was casting a shadow of violence, disquieting a once-peaceful town. Jack agreed wholeheartedly to the idea, so long as he could come along.

A quick Google search of the hedonistic bars and clubs of Royton — Rumours, Arumba, the Secret Sip, to name a few — reveals them all to be either on or within a 10-metre radius of Rochdale Road, centering around the junction where the road meets the precinct. Right on the corner of the two sits the infamous Bono, which has recently made such headlines as “Man glassed inside bar” in December of last year, and “Ugly brawl erupts outside popular nightspot as woman ‘dragged down street screaming’” as recently as February. The latter prompted the Oldham Chronicle piece. In response to the bad press, Bono has released a series of increasingly defensive statements on Facebook, claiming that they have been the victims of “misinformation”, stating that coverage of the violence was “one-sided”, and uploading a photo of seven bouncers outside the club with the caption “#safety #first”.

Whether the news reports were accurate representations of Royton town centre or otherwise, Jack and I decide that we’re better off starting our night a few minutes further Rochdale-ward along the high street, at a Sam Smiths pub called the Junction Inn. A group sat directly at the entrance takes an immediate interest in us, and invites us to sit with them. Among them is the pub landlady, her partner, their infant child who is strapped to a carrier about a metre away from the dart board, a drunk man in his 40s that we come to know as Shaun Reading, and an even drunker man in his 70s known only to us as ‘Mr Royton’. Shaun takes great pride in telling me he was born in Royton. “The place of birth on my passport? Royton,” he says. His mother was so loyal to the town that she birthed him in her bedroom to avoid the indignity of an Oldham-born son. The group informs us that Oldham has recently “passed the baton” to Royton as the place-to-be — in fact, everyone at the table agrees they’d even rather a night out in Rochdale over Oldham these days. “But you know what, and honestly, I speak for everyone here,” interrupts Mr Royton. “Do you know where’s the best place to go on a night out? Here.”

Mr Royton drinks pints of Taddy Lager that he refers to only as pints of “full fat”, and between them he tells me about the history of Royton — how the town once consisted entirely of five council estates, and how he grew up on all of them. He tells me that, despite what the papers say, a thriving nightlife in the town – and the violence that accompanies it –  is far from unfamiliar. Mr. Royton once worked as the bouncer at the local nightclub, Scandals, formerly known as Tram Tracks, later known as Jo Jos, now a housing estate. He loved the violence of the job, and he laughs while describing how during his tenure there he had his earlobe bitten off, and his nose bitten through. Still, he doesn’t deny that the nature of the aggression has changed in recent times. “It’s worse now. Then it was testosterone. Now they have machetes,” he says. Mr Royton is referring to an incident in the town that occurred in May 2023, when a bouncer of a town-centre bar spotted two men covered in blood walking down the high street, one of them with a machete behind his back.

So why then, with such a violent reputation, has Royton claimed the nightlife baton? Everyone at our table at the Junction Inn has a different theory from the other. Shaun claims that bars and clubs in Oldham are closing down — over six in 2023 alone — leaving Royton as the next best option. Mr Royton claims that Royton has always been the place to go. The men at the table complain loudly that the influx of cocktail and wine bars has tainted the town’s pub culture, while the women at the table whisper secretly to me about nice spots for prosecco when the men aren’t listening. I ask Mr Royton what his favourite cocktail is and he doesn’t dignify me with a response  — instead opting for a series of invasive questions about my life, my hair and whether or not Jack and I are siblings.

After a few pints and a challenge to a game of darts that I turn down even after they reluctantly agree to move the baby away from the board, Jack and I decide to head 100 or so metres down the road to the town centre. Our next stop is Rumours, a bar that the Oldham Chronicle refers to as “a veteran Royton pub” — not one of the new and flashy bars that have recently invaded the high street. We find Rumours in the middle of an otherwise quiet precinct, a few strides away from ominous Bono, packed to the brim with 30-to-50-somethings screaming Meatloaf lyrics and drinking pints out of plastics. I pop in to buy a drink, and then pop out again to chat with the man on the door.

Ralph is originally from Nigeria, currently lives in Bury, and has been the bouncer at Rumours for two years now. In that time, he tells me, little has changed. “The locals like it here. The visitors are a bit shocked,” he says. Ralph chalks the reaction of newcomers down to their surprise at just how good Royton is, and I have to admit that, for a small bar in the precinct of a small town, currently playing famously creepy 2013 chart-topper ‘Blurred Lines’ by famously creepy singer Robin Thicke, I’m having a good time. Everyone in Rumours is quite evidently delighted to be there, and the joy is infectious. Ralph agrees that Royton has become more popular, but has it become more violent? “The violence isn’t here,” he answers, looking suspiciously at the four or five bouncers patrolling outside the still-quiet Bono. Why not? “Crowd control,” he replies proudly. “I watch who comes in, who comes out. I monitor them. I pre-empt it.” Ralph had previously asked me and Jack for our IDs when we’d come in, and then told us he was only joking.

Outside Rumours we get chatting to a man in his 40s called Mark, who answers a few of our questions. It’s karaoke night at the bar, and he tells us that his go-to track is ‘Gold’ by Spandau Ballet. What’s so good about Royton? Mark points out the various options available to us, and within sight. “There’s the pub where you can get cocktails or whatever,” he says pointing to Arumba — a rum bar, hence the name, that came to the precinct in 2022. “My pub there is the dodgy one,” he says proudly, pointing further down the precinct at the Duke of Edinburgh, “and you’ve got your restaurants,” he adds, gesturing vaguely to Rochdale Road, “which is nice for the girls.” Like many of the locals we speak to, Mark makes sure to add that Oldham is a “shithole”, insisting that the entire town is “badly run” and that “no one’s going and getting a taxi there, are they?”. He is partial to the occasional night out in Rochdale however. “Royton’s a nice place to go with your mrs,” he says, “but Rochdale’s a nice place to go…” he trails off and eyes us both suspiciously, “with your mrs too. It’s even better!” Is Royton violent? “Nah!” says Mark, “not at all!” Shall me and him have a fight? “What did you say?” he asks. No, nothing, I reply. We stay for another couple of drinks, but when Mark begins his eighth rendition of Chas and Dave’s Margate (made famous by Mark’s favourite show: Only Fools and Horses), we finally head to Bono.

In stark contrast to the Junction Inn and Rumours where Jack and I were bringing the average age down by a decade or two, in Bono it seems that if I offer anyone a drink and start asking where they live, I’ll get arrested. The whole bar stinks of rum and coke, and the music consists entirely of house remixes of pop songs which you can’t dance to because your shoes have stuck to the floor. I can’t actually interview anyone in Bono, both because of the noise and because I would need their parents' consent, so I will simply tell you in short: the place does not appear, at least tonight, to be violent. As it’s considerably past our bedtime at this point, and because I can only take so much Sean Paul, Jack and I decide it might be time to end our Big Night Out in Royton here.

After the incident in February, Conservative councillor Lewis Quigg said that more needed to be done to keep violent behaviour in Royton in check — specifically suggesting that the GMP “get a grip”. Since then, things have calmed down. The bouncer at Rumours told me that he hadn’t seen violence in Royton for at least six weeks. Perhaps the most interesting thing about our visit to the town is that, while evidently new clubs have brought an influx of youngsters, the existing bars remain essentially unaffected. The Junction Inn drinkers — only a few hundred yards from the bacchanalia of Bono — tell me the changes haven’t reached that far. And rather than feeling an atmosphere of violence, everywhere we went in Royton was unusually welcoming — they didn’t even seem to mind about Jack being a southerner or anything like that. As Mr Royton himself put it to us, between calling my hometown of Todmorden both “posh” and “shit” and telling me my fringe makes me look like a child: “You don’t come to Royton, you arrive”.