Richard Girgis had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but after the latest call from his concierge, he feels he has no choice: He must know what’s happening inside his flat.
For some time now, he’s been hearing about all sorts of strange things… parties that go on late into the evening, people coming and going in the small hours of the morning, and delivery trucks pulling up outside, with men carrying boxes upstairs. Strangest of all were the 25 peculiar visitors that seemed to arrive each night, every one of them carrying a black briefcase, and taking it with them into Girgis’ flat.
“Wait — I think someone’s in there,” the chief concierge says to Girgis and his wife as they stand on the 35th floor of Beetham Tower, outside the door of a flat Girgis has been renting to a supposed international student. The three of them strain to hear. They knock on the door — twice. Nothing. But when the trio tries the handle, just to see whether the door has been locked, it gives way.
“Never in a million years,” Girgis tells me, “did I expect to see what I saw.”
Girgis owns three flats and lets them via a Manchester-based property agent. It’s March 2026 — three months earlier, the agent had conducted a viewing for an older Chinese man looking for accommodation for his daughter, who was said to be moving to Manchester for university. Girgis thought he’d lucked out: The man seemed respectable, had an excellent credit history and offered to pay six months upfront.
A tenancy agreement was signed at the end of January and all was going smoothly, aside from one odd request: On the day she moved in, the student asked if all the bedroom furniture could be moved so she could use the space as a gym.
But within two weeks, the calls from Beetham Tower’s front desk began. The concierge told Girgis the woman had been “partying late into the evening, with people coming and going till 5am.” The smell of cannabis was lingering in the hallways, and other residents were complaining. Annoying, sure, but students throwing parties isn’t particularly exceptional. Girgis texted the student and she apologised, promising it wouldn’t happen again.
A week later, another call came, and this time, the concierge told him about the delivery truck, and the men with the black cases. Girgis messaged the tenant again, who denied any wrongdoing. He went back to the concierge, who said plainly that the tenant was lying.
One morning at around 5am, a drunk visitor began hammering on the wrong apartment door after forgetting which flat they were trying to get into, thinking it was Girgis’ flat, terrifying a mother and her baby living next door. Girgis tried calling the tenant, but she didn’t answer.
“I’m visiting tomorrow. You’ve got 24 hours’ notice,” he texted her.
“I’m going on holiday tomorrow,” she replied.
Girgis said he was coming anyway — which brings us back to the hallway outside his flat, in front of the door that turns out not to be locked. What he expected to find was evidence of student parties: People asleep on sofas, damage to the furniture, perhaps empty glasses or baggies scattered across surfaces. He found something far more bizarre.
What Girgis and his wife couldn’t have known was that a man was standing directly on the other side of the door, watching them through the peephole. When the concierge pushes the door open, it catches the man and he steps aside without saying a word. They’re hit by the stench of stale smoke. Further down the hallway, another man is crouched on the floor, ripping up carpet mottled with black scorch marks.
Foam panels have been fitted around the doors to soundproof the flat and contain the smoke, food and drink menus lie scattered around the floor, and all along the floor-to-ceiling windows are countless stickers, each one of them with a drawing of a shisha pipe, and the words “SKYLINE CLUB MCR” written in red letters. Bar service appears to have been taking place on the balcony, where empty bottles of spirits are stacked against the walls. Girgis’ flat, evidently, was now Manchester’s newest shisha lounge, with the best views in the city.
Branding for “SKYLINE CLUB MCR”, Manchester’s newest shisha lounge. Photo: Richard Girgis.
As Girgis begins questioning the man ripping up his carpet, the other resumes frantically painting over walls stained with tar-like residue. The man says he doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know where the student is either. Nor does he know how the burns got on the carpet, or how the bottles appeared behind him. The cocktail menus seem to baffle him and Girgis in equal measure, but the man is able to explain one thing.
“What’s this?” Girgis asks, pointing to one of the stickers.
“The owner likes it as decoration,” he responds.
The two men insist they are just trying to “help” clean up the flat, but Girgis orders them to leave.
When Girgis rings the police later that afternoon, he can imagine what they might say. Surely they’ll be shocked to hear of a high-rise flat in the city centre being converted into an exclusive shisha bar right under the landlord’s nose. But they’re unfazed. Not only is this not the first they’ve heard of such an incident, if anything, it’s a story that’s become increasingly familiar.
I found all this out two weeks ago, as a side effect of my reporting on Beetham Tower’s bitter cladding dispute. When I heard this last detail – that shisha bars are supposedly cropping up all over Manchester’s luxury towers – I set out on Tuesday to try and locate one myself.
Naturally, my first stop is Deansgate Towers, where most residents look at me like I’m on the wind up. Yes, there is a shisha bar here, they tell me, but it’s a licensed venue at the bottom of the towers, called Kouba.
But they have seen their fair share of strange uses for a flat: Dark kitchens, “gentlemen’s clubs” and casinos, with the latter triggering police raids in the past. One tenant explains that this isn’t a case of a few mates gambling on a weekend — they say clubgoers end up owing huge sums of money. One of them remembers the whole tower being evacuated during a raid, and residents wandering the city centre in their dressing gowns. The concierge at Beetham Tower, incidentally, believes that the black cases carried into Girgis’ flat contained gambling equipment. Still, the tenant at Deansgate Tower tells me things have quietened down recently, and some of the newer residents haven’t experienced anything like this.
This version of events sits awkwardly alongside an account from a different high-rise concierge, who suggests Deansgate Square is precisely where the action is. New staff working in Manchester’s high-rises, they say, are warned during training of certain “clientele” drawn to luxury apartments for the extra security they offer. When I push them on what “clientele” means, they say drug dealers. I asked GMP about the alleged police raids, casinos and shisha bars, and they said they’re “aware of reports, and are actively working with partners to establish the full circumstances,” adding that they’ll “take action where appropriate.”
Over at Three60 – Manchester’s only cylindrical skyscraper – one resident tells me that eight police with night-vision goggles recently conducted a raid in the early hours, and they know of bouncers being hired on the doors of flats-turned-illicit-casinos. They say dark kitchen drop-offs from other tower blocks have even been banned here. I ask them how I’d find one of these underground venues, and they show me a Chinese social media app which I quickly download, but all I seem to find are flat adverts.
At a loss, I ask someone else, who points me in the direction of Elizabeth Tower, a 52-storey glass building over the road that sits behind the Deansgate Square cluster. In there, I’m told, is where I’ll find the real action. But staff at the desk are not forthcoming: “We get a lot of problems, but we’re not allowed to discuss it.”
If secret shisha bars and illicit casinos really are hiding all over Manchester’s luxury towers, then almost nobody seems to agree exactly where they are, or what they are, or whether they’re increasing or disappearing. But perhaps that’s the point. In the city’s high-rises, entry is exclusive and visibility is optional. Certainty, therefore, is in short supply.
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