Village people

By Jack Dulhanty

It’s around 9pm on the Saturday of the August bank holiday weekend. I’m standing on a curb eating fish and chips while Ellie, a woman in her twenties, walks me through her situationship with a man named Jamie. J-names are always the worst, and Ellie has been webbed into this on-and-off, something-or-nothing predicament for three years but assures me it’s fine and I nod along. 

She sits on the floor with her back against the chip shop looking out onto the street. In the distance we can hear the shapeless, inarticulate groans groups of drunk men make to indicate agreement, displeasure, angst or ecstasy — wooooooyyyyyy. Around the corner, someone is vomiting into the darkness and when it hits the pavement it sounds like applause. 

I’m exactly halfway through the Didsbury Dozen, a pub crawl through the portion of Wilmslow road known as Didsbury Village. The Village, as I’ll refer to it herein, has been a popular thoroughfare for decades. The Didsbury Dozen — let’s call that the Dozen — has also existed, in various incarnations and pub-orderings, since the ‘80s when Didsbury was still a student area.

The reason I’m here listening to Ellie’s romantic travails is because the Dozen has seen a surge in popularity in the last year or two, which has begun to distort how some local residents think about their area. They think it is a symptom of a broader problem with the high street, that the Village is losing its character — its village feel. Independents have been replaced by big brands, new restaurants and bars come and go but none can seem to stick it. The Village is becoming bland, a bit boring. And that isn’t helped by the Dozeners coming every weekend to use it as a theme park: to have their fun, maybe vomit, and then go home.

“When I first came to Didsbury” says Martin Devlin, who has been the landlord of the Fletcher Moss (one of the Dozen) for the last 12 years, “you’d get one or two Dozens a month.” On Saturdays they’d see maybe three or four groups doing the crawl. “Now, we get between 30 and 40”. 

These groups, often in fancy dress, come from within and beyond Greater Manchester. I met one guy dressed as The Dude from the Big Lebowski (though the fake moustache was more Kaiser Wilhelm) who had come from Warrington. “It’s fun, I’m fucked,” is what he told me when I asked for his opinion on the Dozen.

Devlin has noticed more people coming up from the midlands. He thinks the crawl’s recent inclusion in various to-do guides is driving its boosted popularity. Although the pubs themselves have also been eager to amp up their marketing. The Didsbury, a pub which in some iterations is the Dozen’s first stop, now even brews a special beer named after the crawl. Others, like the Famous Crown, put out signs to remind wayward drinkers to stop there too. 

“A lot of the bars and pubs in Didsbury survive on Saturday’s takings alone,” Devlin says. Fletcher Moss has a regular seven-days-a-week crowd, but others in the area don’t open on Mondays and Tuesdays, and can find themselves quiet on a Friday night. For them, the Dozen has been a lifeline. But for residents, says Devlin, the crawl has made the Village a “no-go area” on the weekends.

Local Facebook groups are scattered with references to the latest indignity the Dozen has visited upon the Village. “I just came round the corner onto Old Oak St yesterday at about 4pm, with my 12-year-old daughter, to be greeted by a group of folk in fancy dress watching a girl urinating on the pavement,” one post from May reads. “Between the Royal Oak and the Fletcher Moss, it’s hardly a long distance to get caught short!”

There has been an awful lot written about Didsbury. To outsiders it is a perennially leafy, affluent suburb, filled with young professionals and rich out-of-town gentrifiers. The reality is more complex. “You don’t need to manufacture silly nothing-stories that make us sound like a bunch of prats imported from Chelsea,” one resident warned me before writing this article. 

That reputation, some say, conceals the very real issues affecting the area. Like sky-high rents and business rates that clear out independents. Leaving high streets like the Village’s open only to places like Gail’s, the “hedge-funded pseudo bakery” from London — to quote Phil Griffin, a writer who has spent much of his adult life in Didsbury Village and more specifically the Fletcher Moss amongst, he says, “committed alcoholics”.

There is a feeling Didsbury is lumped in with other affluent neighbourhoods in south Manchester and beyond. “The perception is it’s going to be like Alderley Edge. And it is nothing like it,” says Sarah McDermott, who lives in a detached house on Wilmslow Road. We chat in her kitchen, which smells of orange blossom and vetiver, drinking flat whites from, well, Gail’s.

When McDermott moved to the village 25 years ago, Manchester Metropolitan University still had a campus there, and the character of the area reflected that. “It used to be more of a creative kind of place. I think because of the students and the academics, it gave it that more urban, creative feel to it,” she says. 

Nowadays, aside from the independents — cheesemonger, fishmonger, butchers, grocers and a very popular patisserie called La Chouquette — the high street has gone the way of many others: a Greggs, a vape shop, a Caffe Nero, Holland & Barrett and an M&S. To McDermott, the university not being able to expand in the early 2010s because of local opposition set the area on this course. And the eventual loss of character left a vacuum. “If the university had expanded, the culture of the place would have been totally different. Because, we wouldn’t have to rely on the Didsbury Dozen, it might have sustained more than just a Greggs.” 

This feels like a bit of a crude assessment (high streets all over the country would be lucky to be able to keep independent butchers, fishmongers and so on in business), but there is a feeling in the Village that it is now more a host to a pub crawl rather than a place for residents to enjoy. Multiple residents and regulars have described walking into pubs, seeing throngs of Dozeners, turning on their heels and going home. 

If I — a lifelong Salford resident whose high street experience has been a panorama of Shoe Zones and Pound Bakeries — were to be so bold as to suggest what the residents of Didsbury Village want, it is more independent shops and services. Not just a steady stream of new restaurants or bakeries looking to make some money fast. But there is a dilemma here. The people of Didsbury, affluent as many may be, can’t sustain that alone. They need outsiders. But those outsiders don’t necessarily support the businesses the locals want to see. 

It doesn’t take long talking about outsiders and the “right kind of people” for you to see Village residents picking eggshells out of their heels. “It’s not this kind of ‘don’t come here, it’s ours, we don’t want you here’” McDermott says. “It’s more like ‘yeah, great, I love it to be busy’. But I suppose it’s what kind of business and activity those people come to sustain. If they’re just sustaining a Greggs then, I’m sorry, but that’s not adding much to my high street.”

It’s quite a contrast to West Didsbury, which gentrified rapidly in the last decade and is now a popular neighbourhood for young families. “The rise of West Didsbury” as McDermott terms it, also gives a sense of stagnancy to the Village by comparison. “I would think most people in the Village would go out in West Didsbury and not here.” Though it should be said, while West Didsbury retains an independent edge, that doesn’t mean it's easy for them there either. In January, celebrity chef Simon Rimmer had to close his restaurant there, Greens, due to a 35% rent increase.

Walking down the Village high street, I bump into Don Berry, a former head teacher and radio host, as he steps out of the grocers. I join him back at his house up the road for coffee, picking up pastries on the way for his wife who is practising piano with a flautist friend. It is a very Village interaction.

We sit in his back garden under light rain we both refused to acknowledge. Berry only moved to the Village four years ago, but before that lived in Withington (“North Didsbury” as some myth-making estate agents have called it), and has known the Village for decades.

“It’s a contradiction,” he says. “A lot of people would say gentrification. Well, I don’t think this place needed to be gentrified, it was always posh.” If anything, he chimes with McDermott. “In some sense, it's less posh than it was.”

The Village has long been a moneyed area. Back in the ‘60s, there was a rail line that ran through the area from what was Manchester Central to London Kings Cross. “The story goes that business people from around here could get the train to London and back.” Berry says. “So it had that cachet.”

West Didsbury, on the other hand, was a string of bedsits and hovels during the latter part of the 20th century. The Midland pub, now the Metropolitan (recently taken over by Stonegate Group, the UK’s largest pub company, to the chagrin of locals) sat in the middle of the neighbourhood and effectively functioned as South Manchester’s drug exchange. “It was the drug dealing pub of everywhere,” says Pam Siddons, who worked the bar there in the 80s but now lives in the Village. 

The feeling now is that the Village stayed still while West Didsbury thrived. Both still need outsiders to sustain their economies — people from perhaps less picturesque parts of Greater Manchester looking for a day out — but as the Dozen shows there are two sides to that coin. And in West Didsbury things have maintained a more even, independent keel.

That said, Berry says that the fears over the Dozen are overplayed. “There are still pubs for locals to drink in.” 

“Oh, where are they?” I ask. 

“Right,” he claps his hands. “I can help with this. Let’s see: there’s The Station, which is famous for its Irish element. They have Irish music on a Friday and Saturday.”

“But isn’t that the last stop on the Dozen?”

“People might do that. Because it’s tiny inside, and so yeah. They’d congregate outside. I’ve seen that, yeah. Okay, fair play.”

He continues: “There’s the Fletcher Moss down by the tram stop, which is a mixture of… well, yeah. I have to admit it's got a huge beer garden which is full of kids, basically. But the front room! A little Edwardian room where all the old fogies go.”

We rattle through a few more, Berry in a cycle of rallying for a pub then realising it has been conquered by Dozeners. “I suppose the Famous Crown? Ah, no. The Dog & Partridge? Nah, that’s full of kids on the weekend.”

I leave Berry and go to the Station. It’s 11:45 and I sit at the bar with a man named Jim and order a Guinness. After a few minutes Neil arrives and the bartender pours him a Fosters without him asking. Neither of them — with their combined 35 years of drinking here — believe there is anything unusual or even that interesting about out-of-towners coming into the Village. But what they do say is local businesses aren’t in with much of a chance anymore because of high costs.

On cue, Sam the butcher walks in and gets a Fosters and sits talking with a friend. The rent for his shop is £26,000 a year and that is pretty low for the area. Others are looking at £40,000 a year, and there’s speculation that some of the bigger plots are getting charged six figures. Sam’s butcher shop used to be called Three Little Pigs but then he got a call from a butchershop in Yorkshire using the same name, asking for a thousand a month for the rights. He got to work on the signage that day. It’s now just Little Pigs. Business doesn’t appear to be booming; when I ask him how the Village has changed since he came here he looks into his beer. “I used to do full days.”

“I’m not sure I agree that it’s people coming into the area that are causing those problems,” one West Didsbury resident and Mill reader tells me via email, talking about how parts of the area are losing their character. “I think it’s more the result of high business rates and rents. And you’re right that the Village has suffered more than Burton Road (in West Didsbury), but I don’t think there’s a huge difference.” 

But going up Burton Road recently in the middle of the school run — with various models of 4x4 crawling up it like a cavalcade of giant, black ants — it was hard to feel like it’s dealing with the same lack of energy the village has on an average day. People were shopping in Steranko, an independent clothes store, and staff were coming out of the cafes and bars snapping outdoor furniture into form and out on the pavement. People were stopping and chatting in the street. 

Back in the Village, polishing off the flat whites, I ask McDermott if she has ever considered moving away. “You know, I’ve thought about that. But then the question is, where would we move to?” I make the obvious proposal. “Well, West Didsbury? No offence, but the houses are rubbish.”