Depot Mayfield
Temperance Street, Manchester M12 6HR
Depot Mayfield is a large-scale venue in Manchester's former Mayfield railway station, a stone's throw from Piccadilly. The site was erected in 1910 as a railway yard, later served as a Royal Mail distribution centre into the 1980s, and was transformed in 2019 into a multi-use space for music, arts, industry and culture. The raw concrete floors, exposed brick and metalwork have been kept rather than smoothed over, and the venue's capacity runs to around 10,000.
Its industrial scale has made it a natural home for The Warehouse Project, the long-running Manchester club series, alongside festivals, exhibitions and large-scale cultural events. The on-site Freight Island adds a food-and-drink cultural hub to the complex. It is among the city centre's biggest and most adaptable rooms, equally suited to a sold-out club night or a sprawling exhibition.
The Deaf Institute
135 Grosvenor Street, Manchester M1 7HE
The Deaf Institute occupies a handsome Victorian building on Grosvenor Street in Manchester's university quarter, taking its name from the institution originally housed there. Across its floors it combines a basement bar, a ground-floor cafe and, upstairs, a domed music hall whose tiered, characterful room is one of the more atmospheric mid-sized stages in the city. It has become a mainstay of Manchester nightlife, equally at home with gigs, club nights and DJ sets.
The upstairs hall is the draw, a space sized for the rising act rather than the established headliner, and it has hosted a steady run of new bands passing through Manchester on tour. Briefly threatened with closure during the upheavals of 2020 before being saved, it remains a beloved fixture of the city's grassroots circuit.
Gorilla
54-56 Whitworth Street West, Manchester M1 5WW
Gorilla is a bar, restaurant and live venue on Whitworth Street in central Manchester, tucked beneath the railway viaduct near Oxford Road. Run by the Mission Mars group, it works as an all-day operation, with food and drink giving way in the evenings to gigs and club nights in its stage room. The brick-arch setting gives it a distinctive feel, and it has settled in as a reliable mid-sized stop on Manchester's busy circuit.
Programming spans live bands and DJ-led nights across genres, the kind of room that suits a touring act on the way up or a hometown crowd out for the weekend. Its location on Whitworth Street places it in the heart of the city's nightlife district, a short walk from the venues that have defined Manchester music for decades.
Co-op Live
1 Sports City Way, Etihad Campus, Manchester M11 3DU
Co-op Live is a 23,500-capacity indoor arena in east Manchester, beside the Etihad Campus, which opened in May 2024 as the largest indoor arena in the UK by capacity. Developed by the Oak View Group with City Football Group, and backed by investors including the Manchester musician Harry Styles, it was designed with live music as the priority, its bowl built for closeness and acoustics. Its opening was famously troubled, with a run of cancellations and postponements before it finally got going.
The Manchester band Elbow formally opened it on 14 May 2024, and the venue quickly filled its calendar with the biggest touring names, among them Liam Gallagher, Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, Charli XCX, Olivia Rodrigo and Bruce Springsteen, alongside awards shows and major sporting events. It now anchors the city's large-scale live offering.
O2 Ritz
Whitworth Street West, Manchester M1 5WW
The O2 Ritz is a 1,500-capacity live venue on Whitworth Street West in Manchester, built as a dance hall in 1927 and retaining the sprung dance floor and Art Deco features that have long been part of its appeal. Grade II listed, it passed through decades as a ballroom and nightclub before HMV gave it a refurbishment in 2011 and Live Nation rebranded it under the O2 Academy banner in 2015. It sits a short walk from the site of the old Hacienda, in the thick of the city's musical geography.
Its history is bound up with Manchester's, not least because The Smiths played their very first gig here in October 1982, supporting Blue Rondo a la Turk. The wider list of acts to have appeared is long and varied, from The Beatles, New Order and Happy Mondays to Arctic Monkeys and Kendrick Lamar, marking it as one of the city's defining mid-sized rooms.
Manchester Academy 1
Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PR, United Kingdom
Manchester Academy 1 is the largest of the four rooms that make up the Manchester Academy complex on the University of Manchester campus, a standalone building that opened in 1990 with a debut performance from Buzzcocks. Built to give the city's expanding scene a bigger campus room, it has grown over successive refurbishments to a capacity of around 2,600, putting it comfortably in the upper tier of the city's club-to-arena gap.
As befits a Manchester institution, the bookings span generations and genres: Nirvana, Prince, The Cure, Paramore, Lady Gaga and Fall Out Boy have all stood on its stage. For touring acts it is the natural Manchester stop once the smaller rooms are outgrown and the arena is still a step away, a function it has performed for more than three decades.
O2 Apollo Manchester
Stockport Road, Manchester M12 6AP
The O2 Apollo is an Art Deco theatre in Ardwick, Manchester, opened in 1938 with a glazed white terracotta facade and designed as a combined cinema and variety hall. Grade II-listed and holding around 3,500, it shifted to pop concerts from the 1960s and was renamed the Manchester Apollo in 1977, by which point live music had become its main business. For years before the city's arenas arrived it was Manchester's largest room.
Its history reaches back to the very biggest acts of the era: the Beatles played two filmed shows here in 1963, and the Rolling Stones appeared in 1966 on a bill with Ike and Tina Turner and the Yardbirds. Renamed the O2 Apollo under sponsorship in 2010, it remains a fixture of the Manchester touring circuit, its sloping floor and deco lines instantly recognisable.
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