Manchester Munchies

Having picked up my Son from his digs in St Andrews and loaded all his clobber into the back of the car we headed back down South. Rather than doing the trip in one go I decided that we'd stop off for the night in Manchester, it's a city that I know fairly well as my parents lived there back in the 80's. I was keen to see how it had changed and both my Son and I were eager to sample the night life and watch the England match that was being played that evening. First stop when we arrived was our lodgings for the night, a hotel in Salford Quays, and having freshened up after the long drive down we hopped on a tram (didn't have those in the 80s!) and headed into the centre for some refreshments.

I took him to a place I'd heard good things about, a craft beer and Indian street food joint called Bundobust, they have a couple of venues in the city and we settled into the Piccadilly one for some scrummy food (see picture above) and a couple of their delicious in-house ales. The food is all vegetarian but to be honest we didn't even notice, the tastes and textures were delicious, I particularly liked their Tarka Daal which was layered on top of some flavoursome basmati rice, yum! The beers were pretty good too, we had a couple of small session IPA's.

After our supper we decamped to The Marble Arch Inn, which is an old Victorian era pub situated on the Rochdale Road, it has a tiled interior and retains a lot of the original features (see picture above), a lovely space. Fortunately they also had some post-Victorian gadgets too, like a big TV so that people could watch the football! England managed a draw but unfortunately the effort was pretty lack-lustre, a view with which most of the people in the pub concurred, anyway at least the beers were on good form and we had a couple of pints before strolling back to our digs for the night. My favourite scoop of the evening was a pint of "Turing Test" (nice Manchester reference) by Marble brewery, who own the pub, a delicious IPA full of tropical fruit flavours from an obviously huge dosing of American hops, and unlike the footy, very satisfying!

While strolling back through the city and walking off our evening's consumption I noticed how the skyline of Manchester had drastically changed since I was last there, the city seems to have gone from "dark satanic mills" to Dallas with loads of steel and glass towers all over the place, an amazing transformation (see picture above)

We walked back to Deansgate and hopped on a tram back to the Quays, while waiting at the station I snapped the picture below, not the Manchester I remembered, but an impressive vista on a warm Summer evening never the less!

After a solid nights sleep we got up early and headed out for a coffee before setting off for the M6 and home, we walked over to Media City UK which is located in the Quays. It was a bit of a strange place, not many people about and as we sat and supped on our flat whites I snapped the picture below.

All in all a nice evening in Manchester, shame about our national sport, but I guess you can't win them all! Anyway, we both decided that we'd like to revisit the place to explore more deeply sometime, definitely something to put on the bucket list. After an uneventful four hours of motorway slog we arrived home around 2pm, happy to have landed and eager to veg out on the sofa and decompress from our travels.