Manchester's pub landscape is a picture worth painting

Manchester’s Best Beer Pubs and Bars

(Matthew Curtis, Camra Books, £16.99)

What are the odds of this happening? With all the pubs in Manchester to pick from, as I turned from the bar I spotted Matt Curtis, the very man whose book launch I was attending later that day, sitting with a pint behind the door.

In fact, the odds were quite short because we’d both decided to visit North Westward Ho, the rather exciting new pub from Pomona Island Brewery.

Pomona Island, which somehow conjures up the image of a tropical beach strewn with ripe pineapples but is actually a part of Manchester’s old docklands, is now home to new industries including one of the country’s most highly regarded craft brewers.

Its beers are found across the country, but at North Westward Ho there are 18 keg lines plus five cask lines of them, pouring all the styles from pales to lagers and from stouts to sours. The most striking thing, though, is that this is happening in a traditional pub with dark wood, tiles and comfortable seating. Not your usual craft tap.

But this city does beer differently, as Curtis makes plain in his book, Manchester’s Best Beer Pubs and Bars.

I have my own favourites I try to visit when I’m in Manchester – the Marble Arch, the Pev, the Circus Tavern – but I was quietly hoping the local expert might give me a steer for our own British Beer Breaks guide (being published by Bloomsbury). And he did, recommending the place next door.

Sam’s Chop House was not, till then, on my radar, perhaps because it calls itself a restaurant, and I still walked past it three or four times before I found the door, it being in a basement and not in my direct eyeline.

Down the stairs, a bit like in the sitcom Cheers, I felt myself wrapped in a warm and welcoming pub. The restaurant section is round the corner, an old-fashioned dining room with waiters in aprons flitting respectfully between the tables.

I ordered a JW Lees ale, a speciality here, and nodded to the regular sitting at the bar with no response. Nothing new there, but I looked again and saw it was a life-sized sculpture of Manchester artist L S Lowry, pictured, permanently ensconced in what was, in life, his local.

The pub operations geek in me leapt to the fore, worrying that at busy times this was surely blocking paying customers from reaching the bar. (A lot of pubs have flesh and blood versions, sitting there, not drinking much, like they own the gaff.)

But this is the kind of wondrous discovery you can make in the quest for beer, especially if you’re given a little help, and Curtis’s book is just that. He takes us to the best spots not only in the city centre but stretching to the outer reaches of Greater Manchester, including Stockport, Salford, Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale and Oldham, each with details of pubs, bars, taprooms, clubs, restaurants and hotels.

There’s also a short, but valuable, history of brewing in Manchester and how the beer scene has evolved into one of the most varied and proudly independent in the country. Andy Burnham, the city’s mayor, makes it official by providing the foreword.

The book will certainly come in useful for my own research and, in a way, Matt Curtis wants us all to be researchers, inspiring us to get out, explore, and mingle with the local characters. Even when they turn out to be made of bronze.