THERE's a story that does the rounds that twenty five years ago during a hot summer's day a sandwich shop on Brazennose Street put out some £12.99 B&Q plastic tables and chairs. Quick as a flash a licencing officer was outside waving a clipboard. In my mind's eye I see the Simon Pegg character in Shaun of the Dead. "Do you think this is France? You're not allowed tables and chairs outside premises in Manchester," he snapped in his short sleeved shirt.
The point is that a compromise has been reached and an embarrassment based purely on pettiness has been avoided
The tale might be apocryphal but it rang true at the time. Certainly it was a hard fought battle to get to a position where dining and drinking terraces are designed into new development schemes as standard.
Now on sunny days every food and drink business in the city centre, no matter how big or small, tries to find its own place in the sun. We have an article about the best terraces on Confidential - click here.
Mr ClipboardThis is all very good despite one set-back to our long hot summers of nosh and booze.
A decade ago a campaign orchestrated by the police and the MEN after a couple of nasty glassing incidents resulted in bars replacing glass glasses with plastic for al fresco drinking. Shame this as a cracking Amarone loses quality when plasticated. Trying to explain this policy to overseas visitors is a bore. Nor do they understand that because of a foolish few we all pay the price.
We had a reversion to the bad old days of licencing stupidity when HOME, the new £25m arts centre, opened. There's a fine lolling, slacking, drinking and chatting square in front of HOME. The square is called Tony Wilson Place, named for the musical and broadcasting polymath who did so much to deliver Manchester's far more cosmopolitan appeal in 2015. HOME has put deckchairs, chairs and tables outside to assist the lolling and there's bench seating on a low wall within the HOME sphere of influence at the south of the site.
But, last week, as warm days arrived, so did the man with the clipboard and the short sleeve shirt with the pens in the breast pocket. If you moved out from the overhanging canopy of HOME with your pint/wine/gin into the sunshine of the square a man - a very polite man it must be said - told you to go back. There were no drinks allowed in the square outside the canopy. So absurdly the only place you could drink on a sunny day was under the canopy which was in the shade. A square was wasted.
Sunshine, no-one allowedApparently this was something to do with licensing, red tape, the belief that Britons should be treated like children, insurance, a concern that HOME's key audience of gentle arty sorts, academics, lefties and the like would run riot and smash windows. I'm making some of these things up but the unpshot was an embarassment for an organisation all about culture.
Fortunately, unlike the bad old eighties and nineties, HOME got together with the developer Ask and the management company Capital Properties and all the minutiae of detail about demarcation lines and where people were allowed to sit with drinks was put aside in favour of commonsense. After, apparently, a bit of debate.
People can now do what it seems bleeding obvious that they should have been able to do it from the start: namely drink in the area that looks like it's a drinking area. Of course they have to use plastic glasses but we can't have everything.
Still, the point is that a compromise has been reached and an embarrassment based purely on pettiness has been avoided. The speed with which this has happened provides a model for the future and means a classic case of British fudge and bureaucratic nonsense has been avoided. It almost gives one hope. Tony Wilson would have approved.
Anyway, see you all down at HOME at five. We're going drinking in the square. You're buying.
Summertime as it should be
