The Tour
Take a culinary tour of Ancoats, the world’s first industrial suburb where an award-winning chip shop (which pays homage to hip-hop) sits alongside a Michelin starred fine dining restaurant. The Ancoats Explorer food tour tells the story of how a rural landscape on the outskirts of Manchester, with a scattering of farms and cottages, was transformed into one of the most densely populated industrial landscapes in the world with multi-storey steam powered mills which were hailed as a marvel of the Late Georgian era. Hear tales of Victorian Street gangs, Italian ice cream empires and satanic mills.
By the end of the 20th century the industry had gone, the mills were empty and the area rundown. The reverse of this decline started in the late nineties and the area can now be found on lists of ‘hippest’ neighbourhoods (Ancoats was listed in Time Out’s 50 hippest neighbourhoods in the world). Ancoats is now home to some of the city’s best independent eateries and bars and the Ancoats Explorer tour will show you around the best of them, make sure you come hungry!