Where on earth (or in the city centre) can we still get a pint in the sun after work?

Dear readers — we’ve been keeping this piece in our pocket and saving it for a sunny day. During the last heatwave, our drinks correspondent Matthew Curtis did some serious boots-on-the-ground reporting for us, and went round the city centre’s beer gardens trying to answer the all important question: where on earth can we get a pint in the sun after work? That’s after your briefing — which features a few disgruntled readers of The Mill.

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What next for Manchester city centre?

“Your 30-year old who gets married or wants to have kids is starting to go, ‘No, I still want to be in the city centre, I don't want to be moving out. So, you need to provide me with the facilities to do that”.

Last month, three experts - from academia, local government and business - joined us to talk about how the city centre changed during the pandemic and what was coming next. Hosted in collaboration with Colony at their brand new King St location, readers asked about what this shift meant for local businesses, city-level inequality and the city’s working culture. 

Didn't make it? Fear not, we've got a write-up from the event, which looks at why companies are pushing harder to get workers back in the office now, and how much Manchester benefited from last year's Oasis hype. Just click below to give it a read.

Read the write-up

Your briefing

❓On Monday we released our official predictions for who each party might field as candidates in the event of a mayoral by-election, and it prompted a few readers to get in touch (to disagree with us). First off was the Greens: we said that Laurence Blackwell-Jones was first in line, with Geraldine Coggins a close second, but numerous Green party members have since got in touch to inform us that, actually, it’s the other way around. Party members will be casting their votes today regardless, so we’ll know who’s right very soon.

Meanwhile our Reform-insiders have been the first to put a celebrity-candidate shaped spanner in the works, with rumours going around that Ant Middleton, the six-packed TV personality and former marine, will be giving it a shot. Middleton, who lives in Dubai, is a long-term public Reform supporter who once had eyes on running for Reform in the London 2028 mayoral election, then changed his mind and said he’d run as an Independent, but now he’s been seen with Robert Kenyon out on the campaign trail in Makerfield.

Lastly, while Restore was the only party we failed to come up with a name for in our predictions, it’s now the party we’re most certain about. Keep your eyes out for an update very, very soon (readers of Monday's newsletter might remember that the candidate is set to be "a cat among the pigeons"). You can read our full list of predictions from Monday here.

🏫 On Monday morning Jack W finally faced his fears, aka a room of 100 schoolkids at Loreto College. One of our campaign pledges last year (as selected by our readers) was to go into schools across Greater Manchester to teach Mill-style fact checking. A few weeks ago, we kicked things off at Xaverian College in Rusholme, and this time Jack W and Lucy headed to Hulme to inspire the next generation of journalists. We spoke misinformation, disinformation and how to kickstart a journalism career, with plenty of questions from the audience. In perhaps the rarest sentence ever uttered when discussing the mood of teenagers attending compulsory career talks on a Monday morning, the headteacher told us afterwards: “They were really engaged!”

🎓 The University of Salford’s Business School will be merging with the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology — a move that, in the words of one member of staff, may result in “carnage”. According to the employee, there are currently 10 associate deans across the two departments, and the merger will reduce that number to four, while retaining the same amount of students. The Mill has heard that there are grumblings among staff who view this as a “cost-cutting exercise” that will ultimately result in a decline in teaching quality. A Salford University spokesperson told us the shift “aligns with many other universities of [their] type” and will increase its long-term sustainability and academic performance. They said that the schools share similar objectives and the move will allow for more collaboration. “We are taking a considered and sensitive approach to structural changes,” they added.

🗞️ The Mill’s Jack Dulhanty appears in this Guardian piece on how Andy Burnham put music “at the heart of his political identity”, and how it allowed him to develop his soft power in the city region. Jack was interviewed in relation to his articles about the mayor’s former night time economy advisor Sacha Lord, which led to Arts Council and GMCA investigations, and which were followed by Lord’s resignation.

🏗️ And finally, the infamous Wigan warehouses have been inducted into the Fence magazine’s 2026 Carbuncle Cup, a collection of particularly hideous new buildings across the UK. Setting aside the local scandal about the warehouse’s location (directly behind a residential street), one panellist said: “Lots of the residents hate it because it’s big – I don’t mind big, but it could be big and good, and this seems to be big and bad.” Full list here.

Where on earth (or in the city centre) can we still get a pint in the sun after work?

I’m in the beer garden at the Marble Arch, nursing a Manchester Bitter from Marble, the Salford-based brewery which has been custodian of this pub since 1997. Theoretically, life should be perfect. I’ve clocked off work, it’s about 5pm, I’m looking to soak up some early summer sunshine while I drink a pint. 

But the latter detail is proving challenging. While the beer hits the spot, the sunlight is limited to a sliver. As the sun begins its slow descent along Rochdale Road, it temporarily dips behind a row of new-build, high rise flats, casting parts of the beer garden into shadow. But is this an anomaly? Or is this – as some of The Mill’s staff writers claim – the new city centre beer garden norm?

Two weeks ago, amid a heatwave, The Mill team came to me with a very serious concern: having finished a long day sweating in the sun trap that is their Royal Exchange office, they left work desperate for a pint in the sun, but found only beer gardens in the shade. So they turned to me, their drinks correspondent, with two tasks. The first was to find out if the city centre is now so built up that the post-work-pint is approaching extinction. The second was to locate the sunniest beer gardens that remained (and you can scroll down for our Top Ten).