Pubs Archives - Neil Sowerby

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Why the marvellous Marble Arch mustn’t be squeezed out by this high rise hell

We first met in 1983. It was love at first sight. Those tiles revealed, that mosaic floor unearthed. After your makeover you were intoxicatingly beautiful, Marble Arch. Not an opinion particularly shared by some decidedly unromantic fellow drinkers.

It had taken me a huge effort to persuade a posse of hardened Daily Mirror sports hacks to trek through the urban wasteland that was Rochdale Road, Manchester. Just to see a pub brought back from the dead. Ten minutes each way from the Printworks when it was a print works, then called Maxwell House after Ghislaine’s ogre of a dad.

First time, last time. This had been valuable drinking time lost. All too soon our break would be over, as would the evening’s matches, copy phoned in, ready via hot metal to be turned into tomorrow’s newspaper (and later chip paper). Mirror circulation was over 3m, its sport section at its heart. Liverpool were Champions and European Cup-winners that season.

Meanwhile, the Manchester-based national journos drank for England. Around Shudehill there was a phalanx of pubs to abet them. Really only the Hare and Hounds left today. And a lovely heritage interior it has, but not a patch on The Marble Arch, to which I have been a persistent pilgrim over these past four decades of irrevocable change. So imagine my horror when I heard that high rise urban transformation was threatening finally to engulf the Grade II listed building.

It’s not all ‘going to plan’ as the cranes gather

This world class hostelry, with beers from its own acclaimed brewery, is not facing demolition. Just being potentially spoilt by crass developers intent on cramming an extra 17-storey apartment block as close as possible. Let’s call it maximising development potential. Or greed. There isn’t even the usual ‘social housing’ proviso wheeled out.

The plan for ‘Downtown Victoria North Phase 2’ hadn’t originally been so threatening, but out of the blue in September Marble owner Jan Rogers discovered that the proposed Gateway Square breathing space, part of the original 2019 plans, is now going to be jettisoned. So much for the “sensitive approach” to the pub and its neighbours, with new buildings capped at six storeys to “respect and celebrate the character” of the site.

Thom Bamford has covered all this in detail in an excellent article for I Love Manchester. Please read and contribute to the public consultation. My contribution here is make the case for the pub I feel so close to.

It’s not about NIMBY nostalgia. The Marble Arch is a major hospitality asset for Manchester. For personal reasons I’m less emotional about similar plans affecting the trad multi-room gem that is The Britons Protection (these are currently on hold, I believe). Even if it survives being closely cuddled by the 27-storey Apex Tower apartment block, in six years’ time it will sit in the immense shadow of what will be the city’s largest skyscraper at 860ft high. Extra huge welcome to Nobu Tower, just across the tramlines.

The game’s already up for the Lower Turk’s Head in the shadow of its 16 storey glass neighbour, Salboy’s ‘Shudehill Shard’; after protests the Sir Ralph Abercromby escaped demolition in the £400m St Michael’s re-development but that just feels like tokenism; the Jolly Angler, a basic boozer I felt more affection for remains an abandoned shell among the cranes around Piccadilly Station.

So what makes the Marble Arch so special?

A very brief history first… The pub’s spectacular tile and mosaic interior dates back to 1888 when it was a showcase for McKenna’s Harpurhey Brewery. It was one of the first buildings in Manchester to have electric lighting.

At some point during the 20th century it passed into the stewardship of Wilson’s Brewery and was known as the Wellington Vaults. Eventually the locals’ nickname for it, the Marble Arch, stuck. In 1954, on an iconoclastic whim, that whole barrel vaulted ceiling and the amber frieze were covered over with chipboard and paint.

A 1975 Manchester Pub Guide summed it up as a place “where the interest almost ceases on entry”. Apparently it was “very good if you want to watch TV.” A far cry from the entry in Matthew Curtis’s 2023 Manchester Beer Pubs and Bars”: “While developers have sought to modernise the surrounding area the Arch has remained true to its heritage… this compact red brick building with its faux marble facade (it’s actually Shap granite) and pillars that bestraddle the entrance way feels as though it’s stood here for an eternity.”

Well, since 1983 when CAMRA stalwart, John Worthington, bought it, rescued its features and I made my own contribution to eternity. The key date for its current epic reputation is surely 1997. Recession was hitting hard, but Jan rejected plans by her colleagues Mark and Vance to focus on karaoke for salvation and instead launched Marble Brewery. Inspired. This was then well ahead of the craft beer game.

A world class brewery that has led the way

Marble’s kit, in the pub cellar, was installed by the legendary Brendan Dobbin, one of the first brewers to use American and New Zealand hops in the UK at his West Coast Brewery in a less than gentrified Moss Side.

Original head brewer Dade left to set up Boggart Hole Clough Brewery in 2000 and was replaced by James Campbell. From then until he left in 2013 he created a famous roster of Marble ales – Manchester Bitter, Lagonda, Dobber, Pint, Ginger, Earl Grey IPA and more.

I remember clambering down into the cramped brewery beneath the pub with James and his core team Dom Driscoll and Colin Stronge, both of whom, along with Rob ‘Blackjack’ Hamilton, to go on to illustrious brewing careers. Further high profile helming of Cloudwater and Sureshot earned Campbell himself the ‘Outstanding Achievement’ gong at the Manchester 2023 Manchester Food and Drink Awards

All the Marble beers are vegetarian to this day. Jan’s son Joe Ince brews in a custom-built facility in Salford with the beers hugely popular across the free trade.

Still it remains that pub interior that draws aficionados from across the world. Remarkably the exterior was pictured in the Oxford Companion to Beer (2012), edited by Brooklyn Beer’s resident guru Garrett Oliver. Blame the UK editors. Not his fault that the colour plate montage of ‘London Pubs’ featured Rochdale Road’s finest. Alongside the likes of The Cheshire Cheese. Some confusion with the metropolis’s monumental clogged traffic island?

Our own Arch feels very much part of Manchester. Welcoming to old regulars, hardcore ale tourists and a curious new generation checking it out. Over time, of course, it has gently morphed. The bric and brac of four decades has accumulated. It all feels beautifully lived in and shared. They’ve never attempted to rectify the slightly sloping mosaic floor, though the original bar on the side was switched to the back, where the nine hand pulls and eight keg taps live; behind this was added a kitchen and small refectory. The outside beer area thrives spite of the constant construction hubbub.

Not just any pie and pint

The food is consistently excellent. On my visit to discuss the planning rumpus with Jan I couldn’t resist The Pie (or Heaven In a Crust), featuring “Marble stout marinated feather blade steak with drunken onion and boozy gravy”. There’s a choice of mash or thick-cut chips; mushy peas or buttered greens. It’s never going to lift the place into the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs. But then few of those Farrow-and-Balled ‘rural idylls’ could ever match the beer offering here. Or the wit of the clientele.

With the pie I had a pint of Earl Grey IPA. Dangerously drinkable at 6.8 per cent, it’s just one delicious example of the international reach of this new wave Manchester brewing pioneer (Jan is a big fan of one of its successors, Track).

‘Earl Grey’ was created initially as a collaboration with Dutch breweries de Molen and Kees. As the name suggests, the process involves the addition of that tea scented with bergamot. A far cry from the 19th century Harpurhey small beer brewing culture.

As I head out in the late afternoon it is filling up nicely with folk whose love of ale-fuelled camaraderie has made them brave the roadwork chaos outside (pavements shut off, buses prevented from stopping). In such fractured times more than ever we can’t afford to lose our Marbles.

17 November 2025/by Neil Sowerby

Beer, Food, Restaurants

Fish, fowl, fur and flesh – Scotland’s rich larder finds focus in Glasgow old and new

There are many approaches to eating and drinking in Glasgow. At the elevated end the city finally boasts two Michelin-starred restaurants – Cail Bruich in the West End and Unalome by Graeme Cheevers in still hip Finnieston. At the other end of the Clydeside spectrum you could test out the old Glasgae stereotypes, deep-fried Mars Bars and Lorne Sausages, Buckfast and Irn Bru. I don’t expect these fixtures feature if you sign up for any of the recommended Glasgow Food and Drink Tours run by Gillian Morrison. In their palce you’ll be left with the sense of a city celebrating amazing Scottish produce and revelling in its burgeoning food and drink culture.

I’ve been lucky to visit the city frequently in recent years and have charted the sea change (yes, fresh seafood is to the fore). Below are my personal tips. In no away definitive, especially where pubs are concerned. As everywhere, hospitality is in a state of flux. Along the way old stagers such as Rogano have gone and Gamba up for sale, while new places are springing up post-Pandemic. Next time I’m up Brett on Great Western Road is first on my bucket list after a rave review by Grace Dent in The Guardian.

THREE OLD FAVOURITES

If you’d asked me two years ago, The Ubiquitous Chip would have been nailed on. Since its launch in 1971 this converted stables had championed Scottish cuisine from homemade haggis with champit tatties, carrot crisp and neep cream to more contemporary takes on seafood such as seared Islay scallops with pumpkin fondant, malt crumble and seaweed butter. The glorious courtyard dining space only enhances the dining experience – though I am also partial to the dram-filled warren that is the Wee Pub at the Chip.

The culinary emphasis didn’t shift after founder Ronnie Clydesdale, the ‘Godfather of Scottish Cooking’, died in 2010, then two years ago his family sold the Chop to Greene Kings Metropolitan Pub Company. Ouch. Cheeringly head chef Doug Lindsay stayed on, but a recent scan of the menu didn’t encourage, so I’ve not been back.

The Gannet is a fledgling in comparison. Its chef/patron Peter McKenna gets credited with kickstarting the vibrant Finnieston dining scene from this narrow converted tenement. Also championing the best of Scottish produce? It goes with the territory. Now over a decade old, The Gannet stays true to its original mission statement: “Something that evokes Scotland’s Hebridean coastlines, giving a sense of place and landscape and at the same time offering a cheeky culinary reference as a moniker for those with large appetites: ‘The Gannet’ was christened.” For a sophisticated take on those fecund fishing grounds check out the Cured Wild Halibut/Soy /Yuzu/Horseradish or the Tarbert Lobster/Barra Cockles/Summer Vegetables.

My other two stalwart faves are near neighbours in the revitalised Merchant City (home to my recent hotel base, The Social Hub). A real pioneer in this quarter is Hebridean Seamas Macinnes, since 1983 at the helm of the Cafe Gandolfi in Albion Street with his sons now joining him. The L-shaped room offers a stylish rusticity featuring Tim Stead wooden furniture and quirky artwork. I particularly love the stained glass ‘A Flock of Fishes’ by Glasgow School of Art alumnus John Clark in the dining room (my main image). Comfortable in its own skin, Gandolfi? Definitely. A snip of a house white, a Veneto Bianco, went equally well with a dish of Mull scallops and mackerel and a fillet of coley in an Arbroath smokies cream. Stornoway black pudding with potato rosti and pickled mushroom was equally comforting. In another season I might have gone for the Haggis (from Cockburn’s of Dingwall), neeps and tatties. The name, by the way, is nothing to do with Lord of the Rings. It’s a homage to the legendary camera maker.

Just around the corner on Blackfriars Street, the Babbity Bowster pub takes its name from an old Scottish wedding dance. If the weather’s warm the temptation is to linger in its countrified beer garden at odds with the urban surroundings. That would be to neglect the high-ceilinged cool white bar with a fine array of Scottish ales. The building itself, converted in 1985, is a 1790 tobacco merchant’s house, all that remains of an entire street built by Robert Adam. There is a restaurant and en-suite bedrooms upstairs.

SEAFOOD

There are fine seafood places along Argyle Street – among them the aforementioned Gannet and The Finnieston – but the pick of the catch for me is Crabshakk, This stripped back temple to fish has a sibling up at The Botanic Gardens, but I‘m in my happy plaice (sic) here. On my last visit, eating solo in this narrow space, I regretted not begging a large bib as I messily tucked into a whole crab at the counter, followed by a quite wonderful tranche of halibut in a tomato miso with a draping of monksbeard.

PIZZA

You do wonder when a hugely successful indie food business is sold. Take Manchester’s own Rudy’s Pizza, currently being rolled out across the land. Three months on from their own sale Glasgow’s own Neapolitan crust champions Paeseano still boasts just the two outlets – each with its own oven installed by Gianna Acunto,of Naples, no less. After a torrid train journey up I’m given a quiet corner table in the heaving Miller Street original, off George Square, self-medicating with a Negroni before demolishing a very large anchovy-caper-olive overload pizza at a modest price. Magnifico.

PASTA

In the shadow of that great Victorian boneyard, The Necropolis (3,500 monuments and commemorating the city’s grandees plus 50,000 other soulsin unmarked graves) you’ll find Celentano’s, tucked away inside the sandstone pile of the Cathedral House Hotel. It’s the dream project of chef Dean Parker and his wife Anna, whose two-week Italian honeymoon inspired them towards this pasta-led project. Too dreamy? They also worked at some serious restaurants in London before moving to Glasgow a couple of years ago, swiftly earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand. Antipasti, primi, secondi are on the menu but there’s not a check tablecloth in sight. Their home-made pasta is the draw. Who could resists a Dexter beef ragu with your papardelle? Sourcing is immaculate – Mossgiel organic farm provides the ricotta for the agnolotti with cavolo nero and squash.

MEAT

Glasgow is not short of steakhouses. My own favourite for dry-aged prime cuts is

Porter and Rye on the Argyle Street strip. A regular on the World’s Best Steak Restaurants list, it is a carnivore’s dream with side dishes such as bone marrow mac and cheese and beef dripping thick cut chips. The cocktails too are among the city’s best. Another carnivore’s treat is the Beef Wellington with beef fat carrots and horseradish (£90 for two to share but worth it) at Glaschu Restaurant & Bar, which takes its name from the Gaelic word for Glasgow, meaning “dear green place”. It’s set in the building of the 19th-century Western Club and is technically the club’s restaurant, but, unlike other members’ rooms, is open to the public.

VEGAN

Stereois housed in a Rennie Mackintosh building once home to The Daily Record in a lane near Glasgow Central Station, this bar combines a vegan kitchen with a basement live music space. Pair a Queer Brewing Fight Like Hell DIPA with an arepa with mole and tomato salsa or banana blossom tacos before taking in an indie gig downstairs. Under the same ownership, big brother Mono Cafe Bar is half a mile way

CRAFT BEER AND TAPROOMS

If Stereo gives you the taste for craft beer, the rest of Glasgow doesn’t disappoint. Current mecca is down on Southside – Koelschip Yard with 14 cutting edge keg lines. Centrally try The Shilling Brewing Company, a groundbreaking brew pub in former bank premises. Order a flight of four third pints, ranging from the crisp blonde ale The Steamie to the more complex, coconut-roasted porter Black Star Teleporter. Pizzas are the main ballast, but they also offer ‘crust dippers’ that tip the hat to Glasgow with a chilli and Irn Bru flavour jam. An even more spectacular brewpub setting is to be found on Glasgow Green in the East End. The West Brewery and Restaurant occupies a corner of a carpet factory built to echo the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Why? That’s the only way wealthy citizens living nearby back in the 1890s, would allow such commerce to sully Glasgow Green. Today they’d have to put up with the clink of glasses in one of the city’s best beer gardens, serving tipples brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot – the German Pure Beer Law of 1516, specifying the use of only malt, hops and water. ‘Glasgow Heart, German Head’ is one slogan. There’s lots of Teutonic fodder to accompany. Ideal accompaniment? Their St Mungo, a full-bodied hoppy hybrid of a Bavarian Helles and a North German Pils

In sharp contrast a converted box factory is the base for the Drygate Brewing Company – a collaboration between acclaimed independent Williams Bros of Alloa and big brother Tennent’s. It is Glasgow’s interpretation of a US-style tap with 16 keg and four cask lines from the in-house brewery, viewed through a glass panel, and the requisite amount of bearded hopheads. Some excellent value food, too. On the sunny afternoon of our visit we just lazed on the large rooftop beer garden and supped pints of Bearface Lager. It is the antithesis of the mass market Tennent’s lager brewed next door, just to the south of the Necropolis. As a family business it predated the graveyard by centuries and there were once genuine fears the arrival of corpses would contaminate its spring water supply.

OLD SCHOOL PUBS

My fave remains The State Bar, off Sauchiehall Street, with its glorious Victorian interior, fine cask ales, Oakham Green Devil IPA a regular, and Glasgow’s longest-running blues jam. Some legendary musical talent has graced The Scotia on Stockwell Street, arguably the city oldest pub. All back in the day – the likes of John Martyn, Hamish Imlach and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band plus Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty when they were still folk duo The Humblebums. The look of the place, low and dark, has barely changed since the Sixties – the 1860s when there was a famous music hall next door. In 1792 when the Scotia was established, it was a favourite watering hole for sailors and folk heading for the Clyde penny ferry. Such ghosts of the past live on here – recorded paranormal activity is off the scale.

INDIAN

Traditionally, a night of Glaswegian excess involving Tennent’s and dram chasers would end in the generic curry house. Like the rest of the UK there’s now a choice of Indians reflecting the subcontinents’s regional cuisines. For me the most attractive is that of the South – the land of coconut and curry leaves, dosas and moilees. In the Merchant City Dakhin has the menu for me. Recommended dish the palkatti dosa, where the rice and lentil batter crepe is filled with their homemade paneer. They also own the shinier Dhabba further down Candleriggs, which champions the very different food styles of North India.

FACT FILE: The latter was arguably the closest restaurant to my most recent hotel base, The Social Hub. Shiny new, this is the first UK venue for the Social Hub network, founded in Amsterdam over a decade ago by a Scot with a vision of combining affordable hotel space with student accommodation. There are now 23 scattered across Europe.

I travelled from Manchester to Glasgow courtesy of Transpennine Express and sampled their new addition to the First Class experience, their West Coast Kitchen Menu.

For full Glasgow tourism information visit Peoplemakeglasgow.com and, if it is your first time, go for the City Sightseeing Tour, which you can hop on and off.

10 July 2024/by Neil Sowerby

Beer, Books

Modern British Beer – through a glass brightly with Matthew Curtis

This is an epic pioneering tale of brave new frontiers versus folk settled in their ways. Of an award-winning beer named after a 2,000 mile trek in search of a new life… or its champion’s own 200 mile switch from Crouch End to Levenshulme and a kind of ale apotheosis.

The day I met beer writer and South Manc ‘incomer’ Matthew Curtis to discuss his new book, Modern British Beer (note the absence of the word Craft), Elusive Brewing’s Oregon Trail West Coast IPA had just been judged country winner in its category at the World Beer Awards and would represent the UK in the world finals. Cue much whooping it up in wild Wokingham, where this modest but progressive brewery is based.

Oregon Trail West Coast IPA uses Chinook, Simcoe and Columbus hops for “a resinous profile with a citrus undertone, the bitterness helping to balance the light caramel flavours of the malts,” according to Elusive.

Curtis in his book is more hopstruck, and rightly so. “For me this style (West Coast) is all about using malted barley to construct a pillar of caramel sweetness, which is then adorned from plinth to pedestal with the most bitter, resinous and aromatic hops you can find.”

All at a quite reasonable 5.8% ABV, compared with the Elevator IPA at 6.5 I encountered at the Oregon City Brewery once upon a day. I still can’t work out why I was visiting the trailhead of the original 2,000 mile Oregon Trail that brought the settlers’ wagons west from Missouri. Yet the beers I tasted there, far from the hip urban centres, were a further confirmation that the land of Bud and Miller Lite offered a remarkable alternative – one that would be cloned elsewhere.

The Elevator washed down a helping of Reuben dogs that could easily be on the menu at many of our own brew taps. Let’s call it all the transatlantic symbiosis of hopheads. In Washington State’s Yakima Valley I visited both a hop farm that supplies our own BlackDog and the rather fusty American Hop Museum (exhibit next to Oregon Trail can, above).

New wave UK beer writers such as Mark Dredge have codified the global beer styles that have been clarified/reinvented across America and then taken up over here. Matthew Curtis goes a step further and charts the creative melting pot of our own mash tuns and barrel ageing projects. Modern British Beer proves we are not just brewing lackeys; our own cask ale traditions remain the envy of the world, our own innovations the equal of anywhere.

The seeds of his own own beer writing career were actually sown in the States, in 2010. “My Dad had just emigrated to Fort Collins in Colorado, which is home to an incredible bunch of breweries”, he recalls. “The Odell Brewing Co IPA just blew me away, after which I became obsessed with researching beer.” A blog followed in 2012 and he went full-time freelance in 2016.

Sign of changing times, Modern British Beer is published by CAMRA Books (£15.99pb). This new open door policy may rankle with the diehard stalwarts for whom cask beer is the only choice on the bar, but the brews they are ‘a changin’. The sheer quality of a new generation’s beers, cask, keykeg or keg, cannot be ignored.

So Curtis, region by region, picks an exemplary beer from brewers he deems ‘modern’ according to a manifesto in the front of the book. Some 90 breweries in all feature. Omitted are influential traditionalists such as Harveys and Timothy Taylor, only because they are not ‘modern’. In his opening chapter Curtis dubs the whole contemporary beer scene ‘The Broad Spectrum of Joy’, incidentally the name of his celebratory beer collab with Sussex’s Burning Sky, another brewery fave we share.

We met at Manchester’s own Small Chalet of Joy, Sadler’s Cat, formerly artisan-crafted The Pilcrow, perfect excuse for missing trains from nearby Victoria Station. Now under the aegis of Cloudwater Brewery, it is serving as a guest Track Sonoma on handpull, the stuff of long lockdown dreams. I can’t resist just the three as I quiz Curtis specifically on what makes the Manchester beer scene so enticing he had to relocate last November.

Cloudwater’s Double Hopfenweisse, for a start. How could you not live in a city, which can yoke a German wheat beer style with a modern double IPA? Groundbreaking in different way is Cloudwater providing a platform for black and LGBTQ+ owned beer brands such as Eko Brewing, Rock Leopard and Queer Brewing via collab IPAs getting a national profile on the shelves of Tesco. Woke, of course, but the beer scene has moved on, hence the need for MBB as well as The Good Beer Guide.

Curtis has been living up here for the past 10 months. “It was a fresh start in a new city, Levenshulme felt like Stoke Newington 10 years ago and the beer scene was a huge draw.” It wasn’t the best time to relocate, he admits, but he has no regrets. His partner Dianne had been the driving force and he eventually acquiesced. As a freelance (check out the online magazine he co-edits, Pellicle) he could work from anywhere – and when they arrived she found a job, appropriately enough, as Cloudwater’s Unit 9 tap room manager.

Manchester wasn’t new territory for Curtis. IndieManBeerCon, Friends & Family & Beer, CAMRA’s Manchester Beer and Cider Festival, Marble, Manchester Beer Week, had all been ‘magnets for Matt’.

“Every week in Manchester is Beer Week,” he told me. “IndyMan was the blueprint for all modern beer festivals and I’m fascinated by Beer Nouveau recreating old beer styles. The city has a bit of everything, too. Classic old family breweries such as Lees, Hydes and Holts; incredible traditional pubs such as the Peveril of The Peak, City Arms and the Marble Arch.”

His own local in Levenshulme is Station Hop, one of the bevy of craft beer bars that have sprung up in the past decade. Witness their shortlist dominance in the pub/beer bar category of this year’s Manchester Food and Drink Awards – the likes of Heaton Hops, Beatnikz Republic NQ bar, Reasons to Be Cheerful and Nordie (another Levy watering hole for Curtis).

If it had re-opened earlier, Sadler’s Cat would surely have been a candidate. The refurb has been a real refresher. It gets its name from the cat that accompanied pioneering 19th century balloonist James on his ascent and is curled away in Sadler’s Yard, off Corporation Street.

*Graeme Brown of Curators of Craft offers a compendium of ‘modern beers’ online*

Of course, a major beneficiary of lockdown home drinking has been canning. Home delivery has allowed beer geeks licence (sic) to explore febrile, far-flung corners of the beer scene. With a huge turnover of one-off brews or seasonal specials it is exhausting, thirsty work. In my quest to locate specific beers spotlighted in Modern British Beer I checked out Curators of Craft, which mails out British and Belgian beer nationwide from its Calder Valley base. My order, as a local, came via electric bike.

Graeme Brown set up the business in November 2019 and has stock from over 60 breweries, including stellar names recommended in the the Curtis book. But of the individual examples representing each brewery only one could I find. Yes, you guessed it, Oregon Trail didn’t prove elusive. And it’s a beer I’d settle for any day.

25 August 2021/by Neil Sowerby