Every morning at 11 almost exactly on the dot, a group of men gather on the ground floor of the Northern Quarter Car Park: that tall, graffiti-coated building on the corner of Church and Tib Street.
One by one they unlock the padlocks dangling from the back of their flat-tyred vans, and the doors swing open. Out from within comes cart after cart full of corn.
This is the not-entirely-secret HQ of the Market Street corn vendors: a four-storey council-owned car park, sitting across two of Manchester’s busiest streets. When I get there, the men are working in silence, hands sheathed in black gloves, bags of sweetcorn torn open, cardboard cups retrieved from the vans’ front seats and loaded onto the carts.
Just as I’m about to approach a vendor, I’m forwarded an email from a reader. It has the subject line The Mystery We All Want Solved:
"The reason I’m writing is because the people of Manchester are desperate to know what the hell is going on with all of the corn sellers on Market St.
"Why are there now so many of them? How on earth do they make a profit? Are they independent vendors or all part of the same company? Is their presence legal? What does their proliferation say about the state of the city centre?”
Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I’m here to find out.
Meet the corn men
Walk down Market Street anytime between midday and 9pm and the thought “it really smells like corn here” will probably cross your mind. Traders walk the streets – not quite in their droves, but certainly more of them than feels necessary to meet corn demands – with carts called things like “Market Street Corn” and “Corn Stop”. They’ve got different flavours too — salt and pepper, lemon, cheese and chilli. The corn is bought by the paper cup for anywhere between £1.99 and £3.50.
Lucy here, the author of today’s piece answering all your questions about corn.
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