Northern nosh. New guided walks around Manchester.

Guest blogger Emma Sturgess enjoys a tasty excursion around one of the city’s most toothsome neighbourhoods

Peter O’Grady is the right man to lead a foodie walking tour around the Northern Quarter. For one, he’s got the experience. He spent 25 years co-piloting The Market Restaurant through the area’s turbulent renaissance; it was once the only reason you’d venture up High Street. ‘When we first set up, people would ring and ask whether it was safe to park their cars outside,’ he says, as we wander through an alley not far from the restaurant. ‘Now, it’s so busy there aren’t any spaces.’

In his new incarnation as a city tourist guide, O’Grady adds a wealth of ‘proper’ information, of the sort to be found in local history books, to a quarter-century of restaurateurs’ gossip. He knows not only that Socio Rehab used to be a wholesaler called, rather fabulously, Blue Flame Jeans, but on which street the next new bar (and round here, there’s always a new bar) is expected to pop up.

The Northern Quarter has passed through its cooler-than-thou phase and emerged, different but not necessarily worse, on the other side. O’Grady was right there when the neighbourhood’s justly famous curry cafes got topped up with the first wave of restaurants and bars – more recently, he’s witnessed the arrival of pizza kitchen Dough and the conversion of rough-as-old-boots pub The King to The Northern. But he’s also rich in the kind of factual bits and bobs that, once learned, are extremely tempting to wheel out.

We pause among the watering holes of Tib Street to discover that Manchester’s medieval inhabitants may have drawn their refreshment from the river Tib, which runs, or did the last time anyone checked, through culverts beneath our feet. Then there’s a vivid description of the Italian families who settled in Ancoats and became part of the area’s 19th century market culture, selling their home-made gelato in ‘penny licks’. These glass lolly-holders which, between customers, were dipped into a bucket of murky water or given a rub with a dirty cloth, were eventually banned on public health grounds. Very good Italian-style ice cream, he says, is still sold at the Manchester Craft and Design Centre, another converted market building, and if it wasn’t too cold for gelato he’d probably pop in to get us some.

Walking at a sightseeing pace, stopping here and there to take in the relentless barrage of street art, is a great way to look at streets that might otherwise be rushed through (though, if the Northern Quarter is Manchester’s creative heart, it’s time to update the public sculpture). Concentrate hard and it might be possible to imagine Oldham Street as the upmarket shopping street it once was, or Thomas Street crowded with mucky weavers instead of hip young professionals drinking DJ Mr Scruff’s tea in Teacup on Thomas Street. Peering round corners, we see the tucked-away mosque that looks like a job centre and the Majolica Works which produces the street signs, white-on-blue or blue-on-white depending on the lie of the road, that are a distinctive feature of the Northern Quarter. There are snippets of stories about the old Manchester gangs, and the colourful religious parades that once led to a Catholic centre on – where else? – Roman Street.

As we wonder which four miscreants have a dustpan from George Wylie’s New Broom sculpture displayed on their mantelpieces (the robbers steal them as fast as they’re made, apparently), O’Grady darts into Al-Faisal and returns with a bag of crisp, spicy, potato-stuffed samosas and enough napkins to make eating them a practical possibility. One of our number has never tried any of these rice-and-three places, on the grounds of hygiene, but she accepts one of the blistered parcels and eats contentedly. It’s been the theme of a happy, gentle hour and a half; O’Grady has persuaded her to look again.

Emma Sturgess is a food writer based in Hale. Fine restaurants, industry gossip and baking are key to her delight. She is the Guild of Food Writers’ restaurant reviewer of the year, and blogs at Hale and Hearty. Peter O’Grady’s food-themed tours formed part of Manchester Food & Drink Festival.

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