On the Liverpool to Manchester train late on Tuesday I decided I’d had enough. For several months, I’d been followed by a spectre. It had appeared in the Guardian, the MEN, MCR Finest, DJ Mag, the soon-to-be-closing Face — in quotation marks, with claims that someone else had said it, or that everyone else was saying it, despite the fact that neither I nor anyone I know in Manchester seemed to have ever heard it said. It was, of course, the new name for Manchester and Salford’s most popular industrial estate, the area where Cheetham Hill meets Lower Broughton, where the White Hotel (club) meets the DBA (pub) in the half-light near Strangeways prison. According to the publications just named, this area is now called the Strange Quarter. When I saw the name appear once again on Tuesday evening, on the Instagram of North-West-based Stat Magazine, it really was the final straw. I messaged their editor immediately (ignore the bit about rock, it’s about sweets not drugs I promise):
And I have got to the bottom of it. What started four days ago as mere curiosity has developed into a story about what a name represents; how a name can be used, or misused, or co-opted — and what a name like this tells us about the ways in which this area will come to change over the next few years. It’s also a story about two very, very different groups of people: Those who coined the name back in 2020, when it never fully caught on; and those who have a serious stake in the name gaining popularity now.
A strange, meteoric rise
Here’s a quick rundown of the last seven months, during which time the name has gone from near-obscurity to a national newspaper headline. The oldest example I initially found of the name the Strange Quarter being used by the media is a short documentary about the Derby Brewery Arms, better known as the DBA — a Joseph Holt pub turned queer venue on the Salford-edge of Cheetham Hill. The documentary was created by MCR Finest and released last August. In it, an Irish DJ called ‘aalice’ is talking about Cheetham Hill and says the words: “you know, the Strange Quarter, as they call it”. As who calls it? This is the sole record I can find of someone saying the name out loud. DJ Mag did a write-up on the documentary two days later, in which they refer to “Cheetham Hill’s ‘Strange Quarter’, an unofficial name referencing the nearby Strangeways Prison”.
Less than three months later, the newborn Strange Quarter is pronounced almost dead. In an MEN article titled “Could this be the end of Manchester’s Strange Quarter?” the area is described as “the last vestige of grit” in Manchester, where an underground arts and music scene still thrives, for now, despite whispers of mass development. Just one week before the article came out, Manchester and Salford councils had unveiled their new joint-venture: the Strangeways and Cambridge Strategic Redevelopment Framework (SRF) — a 20-year plan to build 7,000 new homes in the area, plus up to 1.75m square feet of commercial space. This could mean flattening the White Hotel and turning it into a flood plain (the ‘Cambridge’ part of the SRF refers to the Cambridge Industrial Estate, home to clubs the White Hotel, The Bag Factory, and Hidden). Hence the probably-quite-accurate doom-mongering in the MEN title. The MEN shared the article online with the caption: “They call it The Strange Quarter… But some fear it could soon all be lost.” Who is ‘they’?
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