The Winston and the Edinborough

We were at the pub quiz and we got chatting to our regular chums, the next team who we call the Boltons. It turns out that we shared a similar history in Manchester, although I don’t’ think we ever actually coincided. We were swapping stories about late-night drinking places we frequented.

In those days pubs closed, much earlier than they do now, and even night clubs and discos closed early. It wasn’t that we want to drink particularly but we wanted to socialise and dance so we found places, illicit places where we could go.

There were two places we regularly went to, one was the Winston and one was the Edinburgh, but I can’t now remember which was which. One was in Moss Side, near Alexander Park, and the other was on Oxford Road on what must have been a bomb site or at least a redevelopment area. When we went to the Winston or the Edinburgh it was when the discos closed so it would have been in the early hours of the morning. Although they were different in many ways, they were also similar in ways too.

Both of these places were the sort of places you might not visit alone, unless you were very, very drunk. These were places you might not visit unless you were with the right sort of friends. These were the sort of places that you would visit if you were quiet, inoffensive, unobtrusive, interested, open sort of people. These are the sort of places you would visit if you were interested in all sorts of others, loved music, didn’t want to go to bed just yet. These are the sort of places where there was a big beefy doorman on duty who didn’t take any nonsense, and would only let those people in who he thought would be all right… a purely personal decision on his part.

So, one of these clubs was in Moss Side, just by Alexandra Park. Moss Side is an area of South Manchester where a lot of people from the West Indies lived in the 1950’s 60’s when the first arrived in Britain; I taught there in my first teaching job. Having passed the doorman, we ascended a steep, dark staircase and arrived in what I remember as an almost square room, with quite a small bar and really loud  and totally fabulous music. All reggae, you couldn’t help but dance to it! The bar was quite small and with a very limited range of drinks apart from canned beer and rum; in most bars at that time there would be cardboard cards hanging up with a variety of food items attached, such as nuts, cheesy biscuits, pork scratchings etc. Behind the bar in this club were hot patties and sticking plasters…

The other club was on Oxford Road, just near the university. It was a single building, maybe originally one of several, maybe three of four stories tall. Up a long staircase with a dirty red and very frayed carpet and then into a huge area with a bar and many tables where people sat drinking. We ended up on one table and I remember chatting toa complete stranger who was Ukrainian; the friend I was with was Ukrainian and they had a stilted conversation…

I don’t suppose such places exist any more with the licensing laws being so relaxed these days… but I often think about them… and I often think about other late night places in Manchester, such as the Conti Club and the Didsbury Lodge… but that’s another story!