Summertime sadness: can Manchester’s nightlife survive the student exodus?

On being a DJ in August

Dear readers — whether you were last in a nightclub some time last night, or some time last decade, clubbing culture courses through the city’s veins. But it’s mid-August, and the students who buy so many of the tickets are away. They aren’t coming back any time soon, and when they do, they’re less likely than their forbears to even go to clubs in the first place (and drinks aren’t cheap any more).

So what’s it like to be a DJ right now? We asked Finn McCorry, local promoter and DJ at The White Hotel and Soup to take us inside the city’s clubbing scene. How can we keep the city partying hard? And should Manchester follow Berlin’s lead by investing big sums to support its nightlife?

That’s today’s long read — the full piece is for members only. But if you want to hit the city’s best club, you know what to do:

First up, it’s your Mill briefing.

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Your Mill briefing

☮️Despite fears in recent days of more unrest on the streets of Greater Manchester, there has been little discernible presence of the same kinds of rioting seen over the weekend. In fact, most demonstrations have been peaceful counter protests, in places such as Bolton and Oldham. Rumours of a far-right rally in Ancoats were unfounded. “The only way there'll ever be a riot there will be down to a shortage of small plates,” one person said on Twitter. In Cheadle, our correspondent Richard Heap, expecting to find racist agitators, instead met “a broad throng of concerned locals, anarchists, Muslims,students and socialist workers party veterans”. Greater Manchester Police said that demonstrators showed “great defiance to disorder and intolerable behaviour, and we would like to reiterate our gratitude to the majority of our law-abiding residents.”

The force also said it has made seven further arrests related to rioting over the weekend, bringing the total to 49, with 31 charged.

🚨A second police officer is under criminal investigation for assault in connection to the kicking of 19-year-old Fahir Amaaz in the head at Manchester Airport. The Independent Office for Police Conduct said the officer was being investigated for potential gross misconduct following new allegations from someone involved in the incident. The original video sparked protests  in Rochdale, where the brothers are from, and Manchester. New footage leaked to the MEN showed the build-up to the kick, which complicated people’s sympathies for the brothers, as they were seen punching officers beforehand. Their lawyer, Aamer Anwar, claimed the footage was leaked by police to “smear” the brothers and manipulate the outcome of the IOPC’s investigation.

🏃‍♀️Keely Hodgkinson, the Team GB runner from Atherton, won gold in the women’s 800m in Paris on Monday. Starting out at Leigh Harriers, Hodgkinson is the first British athlete to win the 800m since Dame Kelly Holmes, and said the “mission was on” to win gold after taking silver at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Mission complete.

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By Finn McCorry

Summer is here. It’s Friday night, and I’m at a club in Manchester. It’s payday, the sun’s been out, the music is amazing and the atmosphere inside is electric. This should make for a perfect party — if only there were more people here.

In many ways, a Mancunian June feels like one long sigh of relief. Every summer the city sheds hundreds of thousands of students, a great migration of kids travelling home for the holidays and graduating en masse. Walking down Oxford Road is suddenly tranquil; being in Fallowfield starts to feel a bit spooky. Yet for Manchester’s night-time economy, this exodus means several months of the year in which many bars, pubs and clubs can stand half empty. This is plainly bad for business, but it’s also bad for the people that live here.

Greater Manchester is home to one of Europe’s largest student populations, which plays no small part in making it one of the best places for clubbing in the country. It also means that each summer, the city’s nightlife struggles. Event calendars dry up, lineups scale back and the events which do go ahead are often quieter. Salford’s Hidden is only open for one night per weekend until the students return. World-beating nights out are Manchester’s best homegrown offering, something we’re known for across the planet, yet these parties get harder to plan for each summer. So what can we do about it?

Image credit: Hats Randall

I’ve been clubbing and DJing in Manchester since I was 19. I went to University in Hull, but I found myself catching the train here once (sometimes twice) a month to stay out all night and crash on a sofa, before returning to my studies exhausted, broke, but fulfilled. After graduation I moved to the city almost immediately, desperate to immerse myself in the nightlife, and I’ve been here ever since. I now make my living from music, primarily as a promoter and DJ in the city running parties at The White Hotel and Soup, as well as in London at Corsica Studio’s Carpet Shop in Peckham.

I don’t know where you’d start describing all the changes Manchester’s nightlife has undergone during my time here. Even without the dramatic pre- and post-pandemic watershed, a city’s vast ecosystem of venues, nights, parties, DJs, artists, clubbers, trends and styles is so volatile, so sensitive, that change is the only real constant. What I do know is that when I moved to Manchester, I was totally convinced that it had the best club scene in the world. I still feel the same way. That’s surely a large part of why so many young people still choose to study here too.

Yet you will often hear people in clubland using the words ‘student night’ with a bit of disdain. Your party feeling “a bit studenty” is nearly a worst-case scenario, second only to no one turning up at all.