Harley Young chats with Elaine, Joint Managing Director of Atlas Bar about what it's like to run one of Manchester’s most iconic bars
Deansgate’s skyline has transformed massively over the past three decades, but one building has always remained a beacon of this end of town. Today, Atlas Bar stands proudly on the corner of the street just below the railway arches of Deansgate station, welcoming travellers from both near and far with a warm hug and a cold pint.
From its days as a spare car parts shop to the go-to pre-party venue for ravers at the iconic Hacienda, in one way or another, Atlas has been a part of Manchester’s heritage for as long as most can remember.
In May 2012, Mark and Elaine Wrigley took on and transformed the beloved venue into a cultural hub, ditching tired, old, dusty furniture for a plethora of gins, a stellar breakfast menu, and customer service that keeps clientele coming back time and time again.
I caught up with Elaine to find out how Atlas has changed since her and Mark took it over and how their hard work, determination and genuine passion for Manchester’s hospitality scene has helped the brand stand the test of time.
Read the full interview below.
What inspired you and Mark to step in and take over Atlas Bar back in 2012? How do you think it’s evolved over the years?
When opportunity came along for Atlas, the venue hadn’t been invested in for literally over a decade.
When we took it over at the end of May 2012, it was absolutely horrible. You wouldn’t have wanted to go and sit down on a chair because you’d have just been engulfed in dust. The surroundings were miserable.
But it was one of those moments in time where we saw an opportunity to turn it into the bar that it is today.
It’s a bar that’s got such a lot of heritage in Manchester, because it’s been around in one way or another since 1998. Prior to becoming a bar, it was a spare parts shop for cars, which was also called Atlas as well.
Its real heyday was around the time of the Hacienda - it was known as the pre-bar for anyone going out. Tony Wilson used to drink here back in the day. In fact, we’ve had Tony Wilson’s son in the bar, coming back and reminiscing, since we’ve had it.
When we took it over, we stripped the bar right back. We knew we didn’t want it to be anything pretentious - because it’s in the railway arch, it felt right that we made a nod to the industrial heritage of Manchester, which is what we’ve tried to do with the graphics and things you’ll find in the bar.
We’ve worked really hard at it, constantly upgrading the environment and really investing in our beer garden. We were lucky to have put our canopies over the beer garden the summer before COVID hit - it was a massive decision for us at the time, but had we not done that, we would have had no outside space for people to sit during COVID, so that would have really impacted us.
Another thing that we’ve really worked at is our food offering. When we first took over the bar only traded Thursday to Sunday, so we took it back to a seven-day-a-week venue. Alongside that came the food; we now specialise in breakfast, brunch, lunch made fresh by our team using all locally sourced ingredients. We don’t have a vast menu, but what we have is really good quality.
We wanted it to be a welcoming bar with a great atmosphere and great service, and I think we’ve achieved that.
It’s no secret that Atlas is famed for its ‘gin library’. How did you build it into the largest collection of gins in Manchester with around 570 varieties? And how do you decide which gins make the cut?
When we took over, we opened with 28 gins. At the time, that was 21 more gins than anywhere else in Manchester. We started on the gin journey before the boom really started. So, we went from 28 to 40, to 50, to 75 and so on.
We were going to stop at 100 but, as we became known for our gin we started getting approached by lots of small, independent gin brands asking if we would stock theirs. We were the first bar in England to stock Rock Rose from Scotland, as well as the Isle of Harris gin, and Four Pillars which is now a global brand.
We’d actually been in Australia when we found Four Pillars there and decided to bring it home. I’d posted on social media that we’d got this gin and they contacted us saying they’d like to come and see us when they were next in the UK. We’re now good friends with the founders, Stu and Cam.
The gin journey has been really exciting because we’ve met so many people from across the world. One of our real points of difference is that we offer really rare gins that you won’t find anywhere else in the city centre. We also hold the title of fifth biggest gin offering in the UK.
Coffee is also a big thing at Atlas bar, with yourself and Mark having invested a lot of time and money into barista training your team and high-end equipment to make the perfect brew. What drove that investment?
Mark has become a complete coffee geek.
We’ve kind of upgraded our machine as we’ve been learning, but there’s only a couple of other venues in Manchester that have the machine we’ve got. Our beans are our own blend that we worked on with Coffee Central Roasting, who are based near Nottingham, then literally every single member of our front of house team gets barista training.
They go down to the roastery to see the beans arriving before they’ve been roasted - they get to see the whole process of how they’re roasted and then they are trained properly on how to make all of the coffee.
I think in the last 10-to-15 years, the world has been constantly changing and evolving, and with that people’s habits change as well. We have to keep up with what our customers want. We saw an opportunity to grow daytime trade, as we get lots of people coming in and having business meetings over a coffee or breakfast or lunch. Another big thing that we've really grown, especially in the last couple of years or so, is our low- and no-alcohol offering as well; low- and no-alcohol, wines, beers, spirits, cocktails - that's really started to boom for us.
You’ve been nominated for Mentor of the Year—what does mentorship mean to you, and how do you foster it within the Atlas team?
I’ve been mentoring for a lot of years now for the King’s Trust and also for Northern Power Women as well. Mentoring, for me, feels like an opportunity to give back to a younger generation.
You get to share your experiences of what went well, what didn’t and encourage them, y’know. It’s great to be able to steer young people at the start of their journeys. Mark and I have been really passionate about this when recruiting for Atlas; the bulk of our team - their first step into the world of work has been at Atlas. Over the years, we’ve seen loads of them go on to be teachers, lawyers, accountants, all sorts of different things.
Mentorship is really important to us and we genuinely believe that if you’re going to deliver a great customer experience, you’ve got to invest in your team and their training.
We do lots of training with distillers, taking the team to meet them and see how spirits are made so they have a better understanding of the full product journey. We’ve had Edward Theakston from Theakston’s Brewery come in and do a whole masterclass on the perfect serve for a pint. Then there’s online training and personal development as well.
Whenever anyone in the team gets the opportunity for development, we really encourage that. It genuinely translates into the service our customers receive and helps the team to understand why it’s important. We’ve got a brilliant core team; Naomi has been with us for 11 years, Kyle and Oliver have been with us for 10 years, and they wouldn’t have stuck with us for that long if they weren’t happy. It’s really important for us that our team feels engaged with Atlas - everyone on the team is encouraged to be involved with the decision making and coming up with new ideas.
Looking ahead to the next few years, what’s next for Atlas? Do you have any exciting plans on the horizon?
We get asked so many times “Are you going to do another Atlas?”
I’d love to open another Atlas, being honest, and we definitely did talk about it pre-COVID. But when COVID hit, I think we were very relieved that we only had Atlas to worry about.
As an independent bar in Manchester, to still be operating after 13 years, we’re really proud of that.
We want Atlas to continue being an iconic bar. We still get so many people come in and say “Oh, I used to come here when I was at uni - I remember the saxophone player that used to play on the stage above the bar,” and there’s this real affection that people have developed for the place over the years.
For Mark and I, the question is ‘How do we continue to evolve Atlas so that we’re offering something new and different to suit all our customers?’
But, most importantly, we want to continue delivering an experience and service that people enjoy and want to come back for. We’ve got an amazing customer base and lots of regulars as well. We’ve even got people from elsewhere in the UK and abroad that make the effort to come see us. A customer of ours is from Norway and whenever he’s over he always comes to the bar. Same with a lady who lives down in Portsmouth - every opportunity she can, she visits the bar for the weekend.
So if customers are still feeling like this about us in years to come, I’ll be really happy.
Atlas Bar, 376 Deansgate, Manchester M3 4LY
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