How to pull an all-nighter in Manchester

If you needed any proof that we’re all quiet-quitting right now, look no further than Stevenson Square, the Northern Quarter’s cafe-culture quadrilateral. By lunch, it’s already starting to fill up with punters, so make sure you head there as soon as possible to bag a space. Park yourself and your pals at an outside table and make use of SOUP’s Happy Hour until 7pm on a Friday (or 6pm on a Saturday), try a vermouth and tonic at Flok (or just get a couple of the Aperol jugs) and listen to whatever Eastern Bloc has started pumping out of its hefty soundsystem.

Time for round two; it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the Peveril of the Peak, but it’s well worth your time. Charmingly shelled in a two-tone green tile exterior and a smattering of stained glass windows, the Pev is the city’s most beguiling boozer, complete with a jukebox (you probably won’t find the K-pop tunes of Joy Ride though, sadly), pool table and dartboard for good measure. Hold your breath and cram yourself into the corner on one of its vintage stools, get yourself one of the best pints of Guinness in Manchester and soak up the pub’s hubbub.

You’re likely feeling a little woozy, so now’s your chance to carb up for the night ahead. Saunter three minutes down the road and you’ll find yourself at the unassuming Pho Cue in Chinatown, set in a basement complete with cafeteria tables and dessert bar seating. Ignore your eyes; the food here, an excellent array of authentic Vietnamese classics, is exceptional. Start with gossamer summer rolls and the zingy papaya salad and move onto a heady bowl of pho for less than a tenner, mopped up with a spicy bun and a salt-and-pepper-something.

Burn off your burningly hot noodles by walking fifteen minutes or so back past NQ to Peste (full name now O! Peste Destroyed) – the best-kept secret of the city. Fashioned in the wild minds of The White Hotel crew, the self-proclaimed impiety shop and hotspot for ‘worming’ is a witchy, gothic dream. Complete with its own confessional booth, prayer-book menus, pub snacks under a cloche, miniature DJ booth, fittingly sinful bookshelf and a Jacques Derrida version of the Sports Direct mug for sale, it’s a dark delight with an occult following. 

Now to Peste’s sister venue for a night of unadulterated debauchery a la Joy Ride. Still one of the best clubs in the UK, The White Hotel – set in a backstreet off Strangeways prison – is fantastically phantasmagoric, a dimly-lit old MOT garage filled with dark delights: the infamous bar-in-the-floor, a projector in the lobby screening arthouse classics and a glass-protected shrine to a single backlit bottle of Stella. Expect wickedly experimental sounds – techno, gabber, acid, ambient, hardcore – and all-out raving until the large hours of the morning (7am, if you’re up to it) before waiting for your Uber back next to the neighbouring fenced compound of rabidly barking dogs. Woof!