manchester

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Leisure, then and now

MODERN-day Manchester is famous as a fun city in which thousands of revellers turn out on a weekend night to concerts, plays and hundreds and bars and clubs.

Not much has changed there in 150 years except the Saturday night entertainment. Jakob Venedey described Manchester street life as “like London but more crude.”

The still standing Theatre Royal’s bar, foyer and lounge were dominated by prostitutes “offering themselves in a most shameless manner”. The theatre was relatively new, built in 1846 after the original, in Fountain Street, burned down two years before.

At the Queen’s Theatre in York Street, dating from 1793, the sixpenny gallery thronged with a rumbustuous rabble, was probably being entertained by comical singing groups, child acrobats and the occasional tenor rendering Verdi’s latest arias. A century and a half ago, the Hallé was still in the future.

In the higher private boxes where the better paid the princely sum of six shillings (30p), young people were also accompanied by courtesans, though with “beautiful, some very beautiful, faces”.

Most Mancunian music halls were little more than pubs with entertainments, though the newly made city also sported the Assembly and Billiard Rooms in Mosley Street, the New Concert Hall in St Peter’s Square and the Gentlemen’s Glee Club.

Little wonder that the National Alliance, campaigning against alcohol, made its home in Manchester.

For its devotees at least, it’s been a frustrating 150 years.