It’s July 2025, the hottest day of the year, and I’m clearing out my desk in the OperaWatch office at Northern Soul Towers.

is the newly established restaurant attached to the Treehouse Hotel at the northern end of Deansgate. The latest creative ...

I loved every second of this. Imagine a couple of hundred 50-somethings watching a very funny play and leaping to their feet ...

The Perspectivists is the latest exhibition to make full use of the modernist shop's modest wall space in Manchester. We take ...

I never feel that summer has really started until I’ve been to the outdoor show in Lancaster’s Williamson Park. The Dukes have been producing a family show in these bucolic surroundings almost ...

The backdrops to a decade, the details which define a period, have a ubiquity which renders them ...

Theatre Review - Love’s Labour’s Lost (more or less), Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot.

Words have their own particular architecture. A scaffolding of syntax and a skeleton of grammar that both shapes and constrains the sayable. Dance, by way of contrast, has the facility to slip beyond ...

Book Review: Rare Singles by Benjamin MyersWriting a pop song is more difficult than it looks. Compressing the poetic with the melodic in phrases memorable enough to catch the rhythm of the heart, its ...

A dreamy window in a dreary January: Northern Soul's Nancy Collantine chills out at Crewe Hall in Cheshire.

Book Review: Precipitation by Ailsa CoxWhen the city’s fluorescence, its frenetic denial of night, has started to lose its fascination, there will always be those who take flight to the imagined ...

Music Review: Bonnie Raitt, 02 Apollo ManchesterWhen Bonnie Raitt was a young girl, she was enthralled by the power and charisma of such blues and folk greats as John Lee Hooker and Sippie Wallace, ...