The Pilcrow Pub - Is It Working?

IT’S just gone three on Sunday afternoon. Up in the Northern Quarter the bars are still packed with lingering brunchers. The Pilcrow, in nebulous NOMA, is empty. As in tumbleweed. The only sound a cover version of Ob-la-di Ob-la-da from the speakers.

I feel the pain of £5.30 for a schooner - premium prices do seem at odds with that community pub aim

A few folk have been in and there’s still a foursome out on the terrace. We met them on the way in. “So this is the handmade pub… found it finally,” we overheard.

They are heavily outnumbered by skateboarders who’ve taken to colonising Sadler’s Yard at weekends, shattering the sabbath calm with their clatter. This is the first Sunday Manchester’s five-week-old ‘community pub’ has opened its doors (from noon to 8pm), so maybe word hasn’t got around – or the limited snack menu can’t compete with Eggs Benedict and a brace of Bloody Marys elsewhere.

 

The Pilcrow on a very quiet Sunday

On Saturdays there’s a buzz generated by a guest street food vendor – Mac Daddies this time; next week it will be Fritto from Liverpool ‘providing on the go Panzerotti (fried pizza) and Arancini (stuffed rice balls)’. Today it’s back to the limited snack menu.

With our craft ales, the prime reason to make the pilgrimage to The Pilcrow, we settle for toasties at £4 a shot – salami and cheese, slivers of gherkin on Pollen Street Bakery sourdough, up there with the Northern Soul efforts, if less substantial. I contemplate then deny myself a Blawd Bakehouse brownie with my schooner of Northern Monk 'Attack on the Bounty', a 7.4 per cent ‘piña colada style’ coconut Black IPA.

I don’t locate any coconut in the brew, but I feel the pain of £5.30 for a schooner of it. OK, specialist 7 per cent plus ales don’t come cheap; the back story alone may be worth the mark-up – a collaboration with a fellow brewer from Siren plus an avant-garde tattoo artist – but premium prices do seem at odds with that community pub aim.

On a more basic session drinking level, take Track’s tangy Troika Pale. We did and it was as formidably good as the rest of the Sheffield Street brewery’s range. At Pilcrow it was £4.80 a pint. The Brink on Bridge Street is selling it for £3.50.

Pilcrow punters are heavily outnumbered by skateboarders

One Pilcrow plus – there is precious little competition in the immediate vicinity. The Ducie Bridge is shut and the Beer House on Victoria Station charges absurd prices for poorly kept cask, so the nearest decent boozers are the old school Hare and Hounds and the Turk’s Head up on Shudehill (with the wonderful Smithfield Tavern a further schlepp). 

All have a genuine pub feel. Not so yet this handsomely crafted wooden lodge, built by volunteers as part of the Co-operative’s £800m work-in-progress reinvention of its ‘quarter’. The craft workshops are a memory and most of the artefacts created have been cleared, but it still has that ‘Pilcrow Project’ feel despite the best efforts of Claire and Kieran behind the bar.

It’s something operators Jonny Heyes of Port Street and Common and Cloudwater Brewery’s Paul Hughes ought to address now the honeymoon period is over. The Pilcrow symbol ¶ it is named after means a new paragraph mark. So turn the page too. Not that I’m advocating Karaoke or a sports quiz but, Saturday street food roster aside, the only event in the diary for November is a Meet The Swedish brewer/tap takeover. Mmmm.

I write as a regular Pilcrow supporter, happy to have such a calm beery bolthole as I wait for my next train out of Victoria (often the one after that). I tolerate the prices because of the quality and variety of the beers from three handpulls and fourteen keg pumps. A regular city centre outlet for Cloudwater, what could be better? And I can bring out a book. But this is not the stuff of community. Ironically the skateboarders are.