Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Shop selling clothing, accessories, and gifts.
This walking tour explores the neighbourhood’s streets, stories and hidden corners, offering a closer look at the places and people that have made Manchester.
From £12.00
Create stunning pottery, jewellery, sketches, watercolours and more with the vast array of craft workshops at MCDC.
From £45.00
Marcos Kueh explores labour diasporas and Manchester’s industrial history at his first institutional solo show.
Free entry
Fusing West African funk and disco with modern post-punk and electro, Ibibio Sound Machine inject some much-needed energy into January.
From £29
Band on the Wall bring people together to make, as well as watch, music. Join them to learn folk tunes from all over the world.
After a sold-out night earlier this year, Me Gusta Collective is back at Band on the Wall for the big one: New Year’s Eve.
From £10
Join Joe Feeley a Mancunian through and through, who guides you into Manchester’s two pillars of cultural excellence with his Rock and Goal tour.
From £9.99
The Manchester Christmas Markets are back for 2025, with many dozens of stalls in front of the town hall, and hundreds of traders spread across city-centre squares.
Free entry
Coffee bar and shop selling gifts and homeware from local designers.
Opened in 1991, Night & Day Cafe on Oldham Street plays host to an exhausting array of gigs throughout the year.
Vinyl Exchange is the largest seller and buyer of rare and second-hand records, CDs and DVDs in the North West.
Piccadilly Records is the real deal, a record shop so good that it probably deserves some credit for the regeneration of its surrounding neighbourhood.
Vintage clothes shop on Manchester’s Tib street, specialising in current and retro trends.
Primely located on Oldham Street in the Northern Quarter, Cass Art Manchester offers a vast selection of high-quality art materials at affordable prices.
A game and comic shop in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Independent cafe in Manchester’s bustling Northern Quarter. Perfect if you’re looking for high-quality homemade produce.
One of the oldest vintage shops in the Northern Quarter (opened here in 1994), Pop is set out across two floors and racks up a cafe, barber’s and basement furniture section, as well as its own label and good-as-new originals – all for very reasonable prices.
Barbarella is a barber shop and part of the long-standing Pop Boutique vintage shop.
COW Vintage, once on Piccadilly Place, now on Church Street in Manchester’s Northern Quarter is a beautifully decorated vintage clothes shop.
Bird and Blend is Tea Blending heaven, located in the heart of the Northern Quarter with new flavours being created all the time.
Whether you’re after storybook theatre, museum wanderings or illusion-bending play spaces, there’s plenty to keep curiosity ticking through winter and beyond.
Step away from the usual. Tours and activities that spark curiosity, inspire creativity and offer something refreshingly different.
This season, exhibitions across the North West feel attuned to the world beneath the world – the forces and stories shaping how we see, feel and imagine.
Theatre across the North West splits between festive escape and sharp, urgent work exploring politics, power and resistance.
Manchester’s closing out the year – and looking to the new one – with a run of gigs from some of the country’s best underground exports.
There's no shortage of great films out at the moment, whether you're looking for the latest blockbuster, that hot arthouse flick fresh from Cannes or a cosy classic.
Hear ye, hear ye. Take some eating-out tips from our wintertime guide to food and drink in Manchester and the North.
