AS VILLAGE people will know Queer Bar on Canal Street has closed its doors.
Queer as a concept lives on, moving permanently to sister club Essential on Minshull Street, taking its club nights Boyz, Queer and Mornin' Glory with it.
It’s certainly been a turbulent couple of years for Martin-Smith and Queer Bar.
So far, Nigel Martin-Smith, former manager of Take That and owner of Queer and Essential, has refused to give us a direct comment, but it would appear that a spat with neighbouring venue Velvet Hotel is behind the move: “The massive success of The Velvet Hotel has been an issue because of the inevitable problems with people trying to sleep next to a busy bar, but now everyone can dance in the new venue until the early hours where no one will be disrupted," Martin-Smith said on canal-st.co.uk.
Essential
However, Essential's neighbour on Minshull Street, SACO Serviced Apartments, may very well beg to differ: “We are aware of the re-opening of the club and as a known provider of accommodation to the corporate, leisure and family sectors we are carefully monitoring the impact that the club may have”.
Nigel’s comments regarding Velvet Hotel also came as a bit of a shock to Velvet owner Mark Cain, who stated that he was “very surprised to hear these comments”, citing an "entirely amicable" meeting at Australasia in August 2013 in which Cain and Martin-Smith agreed that the former "now has no issues with the way in which the bar next door is operating."
We’ve managed to secure the minutes from the meeting:
Minutes
A Canal Street bar owner, who wished to remain anonymous, suggested that the move was more likely to be down to rent increases than noise complaints, stating that the rent on Queer had recently been increased by a large amount.
Martin-Smith has previously stated his intention to off-load Queer due to the time demands of his talent agency and management company, NMS Management, with rumours pointing towards London-based buyers: “As they say all good things come to an end and with my agency and management company taking all my time it’s time to pass the venues on to new owners.”
It’s certainly been a turbulent couple of years for Martin-Smith and Queer Bar. In July 2012 Nigel had to campaign to save the bar from closure after police found a man bleeding from the head following a bottle attack in the venue.
In March 2013 Martin-Smith took the owners of a newly opened Birmingham venue, Queer Street, to the High Court for the use of the word ‘Queer’ and exploiting the reputation of his Queer Bar.
And in May 2013, Martin-Smith publically declared that he would not consider paying a late night levy on the nightspot, proposed by the Council to tackle trouble hotspots that stayed open after midnight, because he already paid £3k a month in council tax and hardly ever saw any police around the Canal Street area.
Canal Street
The move by the Council was a reaction to escalating crime figures in the area. In 2012, the Village had 1,316 individual police call-outs, compared with 675 at the Printworks and 527 on Deansgate Locks.
The Village remains the highest ranked out of 67 North Manchester districts for instances of theft and assault. Twice as high as the second ranking district of Arndale and King Street.
Given the built-in attractiveness of the area - no other city centre district has that sweep of waterside terraces with a park over the road - this is troubling and hard-to-explain except with reference to the direction many of the establishments have chosen to take. What it leads to though is lack of confidence.
A prominent city-centre bar owner who wished to remain unnamed told us they’d never consider occupying the now empty space at Queer: “Rents are too high and it’s not worth the trouble. The Village has got too many problems at the moment. It’s as simple as that.”
Yet perhaps the empty property represents an opportunity to make a start on repositioning Canal Street. A good operator with a quality offering could inject more class to the strip especially given its location close to the beacon operators of Velvet and Taurus.
Again, another anonymous commentator (yes we wish people would stand up and be counted) told Confidential: "An operator with more of the mindset of a good Northern Quarter or Chorlton bar would work well here. Decent food, decent drinks, no 2-4-1 deals, well-run: something like an Odd Bar or Electrik. We need a bar that would appeal to a more discerning audience."
