No banks, lots of dough: Who is Prestwich high street for?

Bury New Road was more or less built along the corpse of a Roman road, which once connected the forts of Mamucium, now Manchester, and Bremetennacum, now Ribchester. These days it sets off from under the shadow of Strangeways prison, running from Counterfeit Street where Operation Vulcan routinely ransacks the once-ancient road for knock-off handbags, and travelling North until just after Whitefield. Not long ago, and somewhere in between these two locations though significantly closer to the latter, something happened on Bury New Road that resulted in a slew of local outrage, widespread online discourse, and over ten articles in the MEN prophesying either the downfall or the heyday of the once-great or otherwise soon-to-be-great North Manchester. In December of 2024, Bury New Road got a Rudy’s.

The segment of the road that makes up Prestwich high street has long found itself in the public eye. Last year, the town made it onto the Sunday Times' list of best places to live, with the paper waxing lyrical about roomy Victorian terraces and "like-minded folk with whom to chomp your grilled cheese and kimchi sourdough sandwich.” The same article also drew predictable comparisons between the town and Didsbury – South Mancunian pinnacle of fine-living. Media coverage surrounding Prestwich in recent years has been nothing short of breathless (See: "'Prestwich Transformed': Eight things you probably didn't know about the massive £100M regeneration of the town", and "The Rise of the 'Burbs: How Manchester's Outlying Neighbourhoods are Booming"), and this attention was only exacerbated by the news that two upmarket chains, Rudy's and Gail's were soon to descend. The new narrative was that Prestwich is all very posh now. It’s not mid-gentrification, it is gentrified, the deal is done.

At the risk of adding fuel to the media fire, we wanted to delve into what's going on in the town. How has it changed? Has becoming a culinary destination made Prestwich a nicer place to live for locals? And do Gail’s and Rudy’s arrival really spell the beginning of the end?

So first, figures. A story about Prestwich changing is also a story about Covid-19. On visiting, locals told me of the influx of newcomers that arrived during the pandemic — families and dog owners keen on clough access and a wealth of green spaces at their door. This is backed up by the data, which shows that while house prices in Prestwich have been increasing at above-average Mancunian rates for the past 20 years, these prices shot up post pandemic. In the year before the lockdown landed, the average house price in Prestwich Central was 12% higher than the Manchester average. Four years later, this disparity hit 41%.

It’s unlikely, however, that it was Prestwich's parks alone that drew in homebuyers. In previous years, the town had built a reputation for itself as a dining destination: the high street has now amassed an enviable collection of high-end locations in which to get full or get drunk – an artisan pizzeria, a nationally renowned chip shop, a bottle shop with corkage fees – and every 15 minutes the metrolink provides these bars and restaurants with a fresh set of eaters and drinkers.

But while Prestwich is no stranger to new restaurants, the arrival of Rudy’s and Gail’s evidently upset the status quo. The two businesses are often grouped together, but are fundamentally different in heritage and scale. Rudy’s started life in 2015, in Ancoats, as an independent pizzeria run by English couple Jim Morgan and Kate Wilson, alongside their presumably Neapolitan dog called Rudy. The place was highly popular, and within two years the couple had sold their business on to Mission Mars – the Manchester-based ‘multi-concept operator’ who already owned Albert’s Schloss, Albert’s Shenke, and other Albert-adjacent locations. They now have 29 restaurants up and down the country, eight of them in Manchester, starting from Ancoats and worming their way southward to Chorlton, Didsbury, Sale, Altrincham, with the single North Manchester exception of Prestwich.

By contrast, Gail's is a Hampstead-based business worth over £500 million, with 152 bakeries throughout the UK as of last month. Gail's is often considered a bellwether of gentrification, and much like Rudy’s, their existing locations in Manchester are exclusively either central or South. In fact, their existing locations in Manchester are almost exactly the same as Rudy's.

Rudy's arrived last month, and Gail's is coming to Prestwich in early February — their premises will stand across the road from one another, and both are taking the place of old banks: Rudy’s a Barclays, Gail’s an old NatWest, and Prestwich now has no banks at all. Their arrival to North Manchester prompted Dan Edwards, owner of Prestwich-based and widely-revered chip shop ‘Chips@No.8’, to take to the restaurant’s social media, expressing his concerns over the new additions to the town. “Their owners don’t live in Prestwich,” he says, “their kids don’t go to school here. It’s likely that they won’t be shopping here. I fear they’ll bring more chains, I fear they’ll drive rents higher… I fear you’ll forget us.”

While Dan’s fears are understandable, it would be entirely false to claim that chains are a new addition to Prestwich’s retail and hospitality landscape. Bury New Road, as well as the adjacent Longfield Centre, has long been home to a huge KFC, a Costa, an M&S, a Farmfoods, a Greggs. No strangers to the faux- or borderline-independents either, a significant number of Prestwich pubs are owned by Joseph Holt brewery – Holt himself hailing from nearby Unsworth, an old Holt family home now a destination Prestwich pub too.

In between the two old banks turned bastions of North Manchester’s supposed gentrification lies The Pearl. Also on Bury New Road, The Pearl is a self-proclaimed British Dining Room; a 24 cover restaurant with the dim-lit decadence of the inside of an oyster — though owner Sam assures me that this is just a coincidence. Sam has lived in Prestwich for eight years. He grew up in Bury, left North Manchester for uni, and returned in 2016. In 2021 he turned his attention to hospitality, opening a pop-up food stall called Sansan that he himself describes as a “stupid sandwich shop” with “kind of gimmicky ingredients” — likely the subject of the previous quote from the Times. Soon enough he wanted a brick and mortar, and he opened his latest venture back in 2023. Unlike Sansan, The Pearl refuses to give in to gimmick, opting for traditional aesthetics instead. “All our ingredients are local,” Sam explains. “The cooking is very northern. Ian, our chef, is very northern.” 

Sam, like many Prestwich locals, is in two minds about the new additions to the high street. “It’s really conflicting,” he says. “Personally, as a customer, am I gonna rush out to eat there? No.” The people of Prestwich aren’t short of options. The Longfield Centre just off Bury New Road – notably scheduled for imminent demolition and a £100 million revamp – is already home to Masa, a bakery where I fail to interview the owners due to the queue that seems permanently fixed outside the door. In terms of pizza, the road is already home to the high-end Dokes, which is right across the road from Rudy’s, and the certified Prestwich establishment Cuckoo which has its premises a couple of hundred strides south. 

That’s three pizza places within approximately 300 metres. This is symptomatic of a Prestwich problem — that the majority of empty premises are getting turned into either restaurants, or bars. “It’s the only thing you can’t do online now I suppose,” Sam says, explaining that he’d much rather have a clothes shop, or a toy shop, or a bookshop, than yet another pizzeria. The latest additions to Prestwich seem to cater to the Metrolink day trippers, not the requirements of locals. “But that’s a bit rich of me to say, as a restaurant.” Sam points this out as a flaw in the tired cliche of referring to Prestwich as the new Chorlton, or Didsbury. “Didsbury’s got a cheesemongers, a fishmongers, a butchers,” he says. “We don’t have any of those things. It’s really bad. We’ve skipped it, or forgotten it.”

A mile south from The Pearl down Bury New Road is Lupo; an Italian cafe on an unassuming trading estate, and perhaps the only Roman business still to grace the ancient Roman route. Lupo is a pizza, pasta, pastries sort of place. What’s their speciality? “Here we only sell things I like,” the owner, Nico, says. Interestingly, the arrival of Rudy’s hasn’t really made Nico feel threatened in the slightest. His only qualm with the business – and one he shares with Sam – was that they offered 3,000 free pizzas to customers around Christmas time, just after they opened. “They’ve got the money, and they can do it,” he says. “I’m sure people will definitely go, but for places like [independent pizzeria] Dokes it’s difficult.” They’re not the only ones to have employed these sorts of tactics. Gail’s made local headlines when they announced their arrival to the village with a sign bearing the ominous words “Hello Preswich. We’ll be here soon.” Later, they apologised for the typo, and are now offering free ‘T’ to Prestwich locals when they open. Sam from The Pearl sees the move as cynical, and suspects that the error was a marketing ploy.

But Nico sees the benefits of their newfound neighbours. “A lot of people will be coming from outside,” he explains, confident that once they’re in the area, visitors will hear about Lupo and, inevitably, prefer it there. Modern Italian restaurants are too concerned with being contemporary over making quality food, he says. “Listen mate, if you don’t know how to make a carbonara, just say that.”

Still, an influx of visitors isn’t entirely perceived as an advantage. Many of the locals I speak to don’t seem over the moon about their town being marked out as a dining attraction, and there’s a sense that both the real independent restaurants and the new faux independents are for those from out-of-town. 

“No residents of Prestwich that I know are gonna go to Rudy’s for the next three years,” says Jon Walsh when I meet him for a pint in one of Prestwich’s many Joseph Holt-owned pubs. “People are gonna come on the tram, that makes it a destination, and that’s a hideous sort of idea.”

Jon was born and raised in Prestwich, and he founded Pariah Press, a Manchester-based printing house which over the years has published a plethora of local writers, from Jennifer Reid to Anthony Burgess. He tells me what should perhaps be obvious: that Prestwich’s real identity is so far removed from its dining scene. “This village, maybe because of the psychiatric hospital, has always had an oddness to it,” he says. “The motorway’s close by, an escape route. It’s always felt partially transient.” Jon describes how, as a child, on Wednesdays he’d see the patients out on day release from Prestwich Hospital. “You’d go round Prestwich and you’d see the patients walking around with tartan hats on.” Once known as the Second Lancashire County Lunatic Asylum, Prestwich Hospital was, for a time, the largest mental institution in Europe, and it still functions today, though a segment of the land has been sold off and replaced by a Tesco Superstore. This is all to say that the regurgitated ideas of Prestwich as your run-of-the-mill town turned new-Didsbury are wrong on both accounts. “It’s not what people think it is,” says Jon. “I think Mark E Smith described it as a hardworking, Catholic-Irish, Jewish suburb. Still sums it up.” 

Jon, like all Prestwich locals I speak to, argues that comparisons drawn between the South Manchester towns and his hometown are entirely unfounded. Prestwich lacks the young professionals of Didsbury, he says, and the contrived eccentricity of Chorlton. An influx of the same fake-independents that grace the high streets of those towns won’t change Prestwich, and won’t necessarily appeal to its residents. “Rudy’s isn’t that interesting,” He tells me. “I just want my bank back, really. I want a good mix of businesses. I want more grocers. I want more means to live.”

This is a view shared by Colin Stott, 68, another Prestwich local that I speak to in another Joseph Holt pub. Colin is a self-proclaimed writer of “dirty books” (What sort of dirty books? “Utterly disgusting ones.”), and he’s also a local divination expert and, to my understanding, a convicted felon. He was born and raised in nearby Whitefield, and has lived in Prestwich for the last ten years. Has he seen changes to his hometown over that time? “Yeah,” he says, “for the worse.”

Unprompted, Colin also immediately brings up both the psychiatric hospital and the motorway, and the impact they had on his childhood. Colin remembers the motorway being built, and the new demographic that came along with it. He also remembers when the hospital started giving patients ‘liquid cosh’, a form of chemical tranquilliser, and the zombifying effect that had on the patients he saw around town. “There’s been an awful lot of changes,” he says, “but the place is still miserable. No one’s got any money.”

Still, he’s glad he moved to Prestwich. “I’m happy living here,” he says, surprisingly. “I’m not going back to Whitefield.” Colin tells me that Prestwich has more culture than its neighbouring town, and a lot more to do. “In Whitefield you’ve got nothing,” he says. “You don’t have a library, you don’t have a bank, you don’t have a post office.” But there are no banks in Prestwich anymore, I remind him, and the post office is due to close down. “Yeah but there’s more going on here,” he answers. “There’s running groups. There’s dogging groups.”

At risk of sounding naive, this seems to be an ongoing theme in my conversations in Prestwich: a contentedness, even an optimism. This could well be the luck of the draw, but none of the business owners or longstanding locals I speak to seem particularly phased either way about the newcomers to Prestwich’s high street — they’re more concerned with the amenities they find lacking. Here, hope is at least on the horizon, as the long awaited £100 million development of the Longfield Centre is finally starting to make moves, and general sentiment in the town is that these moves are for the better. The precinct will fall down on its own accord without the demolition, seems to be the going consensus. The renovation takes with it its own share of Prestwich’s history, like the Longfield Suite, once known for its sprung dance floor which attracted dancers to the village from all around the country. Still, it also marks a new phase for Prestwich, one which hopefully puts its residents at its heart, and doesn’t just cater to those who come to visit every now and again on the tram.