So 2021 didn’t exactly go to plan, did it – but our buzzing region is looking forward to the year ahead with some seriously exciting things on the horizon.
Greater Manchester has done its best to bounce back from another year of decimated tourism, delivering amazing outdoor experiences and attractions.
2021 saw the return of huge city events like Manchester International Festival, Manchester Pride festival, and Parklife.
New restaurants and bars have continued to spring up in every direction too.
It includes outdoor experiences, cultural developments, hospitality openings, and events.
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We’ve picked out 22 things heading to Greater Manchester in 2022.
Mayfield Park
Credit: Mayfield Parnership
Manchester’s first new park in more than 100 years will be unveiled in late 2022.
Spanning 6.5 acres, Mayfield Park is currently under construction on the sprawling Mayfield site adjacent to Piccadilly Station.
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UEFA Women’s EURO 2022
This will be massive for Greater Manchester – the women’s tournament is kicking off here next year.
England will play Austria at Old Trafford on July 6, with several other fixtures at Manchester City Academy, Leigh Sports Village, and DW Stadium in Wigan.
Mrs Doubtfire the Musical
One of the best films of all time has been turned into a Broadway show, and Manchester will be treated to the first performances on home turf in 2022.
Mrs Doubtfire the Musical will have its UK premiere at the Opera House Manchester on September 2 and will run until October 1.
This long-neglected and under-appreciated gem of industrial architecture in Manchester city centre will have new life breathed into it in 2022.
The Grade II-listed Castlefield Viaduct is being turned into an elevated urban park, much like New York’s High Line, by the National Trust.
Phase one will open to the public in the summer – read more here.
Soho House
One of the biggest hospitality names in the world will make its way to Manchester in 2022, taking over the upper three floors of the former Granada Studios building.
It will be a key operator in the new St John’s neighbourhood, which will also be home to MIF’s The Factory from 2023.
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It’s expected to include a rooftop bar and pool as well as dining rooms, lounge areas and a Mollie’s Motel & Diner concept.
Band on the Wall
CGI of how Band on the Wall will look
Gosh, we’ve missed this place – the historic gig venue Band on the Wall will finally reopen in the spring.
It’s been undergoing a big renovation while we’ve all been nipping in and out of lockdowns, expanding into the Victorian Cocozza building that’s been derelict at the back of the venue for decades.
Manchester Museum
Another reopening here – the much-loved Manchester Museum closed back in the summer while it grows into its £13.5 million extension.
When it reopens late in 2022, it will have a new two-storey extension, a new exhibition hall, the South Asia Gallery, and Chinese Culture Gallery.
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Rugby League World Cup
Old Trafford might be famed for its football pedigree, but in 2022 it will turn its attention to the world of rugby.
The rescheduled 2021 Rugby League World Cup, and Women’s Rugby League World Cup, will take place in October and November.
The Wheelchair Final will be held at Manchester Central, and additional fixtures are taking place at the University of Bolton Stadium and Leigh Sports Village.
Sexy Fish
Credit: Spinningfields
Decadent Mayfair restaurant Sexy Fish, owned by The Ivy’s Richard Caring, is taking over the old Armani unit in Spinningfields.
It first opened in 2015 and is famed for its luxurious dining environment and will be one of the most talked-about restaurant openings of 2022.
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Gratitude Games
This is a new event – a multi-sport games created to support the mental health of emergency service and NHS workers.
It will be held at venues across Greater Manchester in April and May. Spanning 20 sports – including both traditional sports such as athletics, cycling, swimming, as well as niche sports like angling, lawn bowls and squash – it’s a chance for our emergency services and NHS to have fun, enjoy the benefits of sport and for the public to thank them for the amazing work they do.
Northern Roots
Oldham’s ambitious eco-project, which will see the UK’s largest urban farm built just outside Oldham town centre, is moving forward.
The 160-acre Northern Roots will include hand-on community projects like beekeeping, animal husbandry and growing plots, as well as a bike hub, mountain biking trails, arts, culture and events, and a natural amphitheatre and swimming pond.
Pollen Bakery
Credit: Pollen / No Chintz Studio
Famed Ancoats bakery is expanding with a second location, this time at Kampus.
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The new location will offer an expanded brunch menu as well as more room for baking their sell out breads and pastries, with a chance for customers to see the kitchen working.
Leonardo Hotel
The Leonardo will open in Manchester in 2022. Credit: Capital & Centric
Capital & Centric’s Jenga-inspired hotel is well on the way and due to open in spring.
The £35m development, in the heart of Piccadilly East, will be draped in plants and plans include a ground-floor restaurant, cafe, and external terrace connecting to a new public square.
Jodrell Bank
Cheshire’s UNESCO attraction Jodrell Bank will welcome its new addition, the £21m First Light Pavilion, in May.
It will be a new gallery dedicated to telling the story of Jodrell Bank, with an immersive projection space and auditorium, and a new education hub and café.
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Wigan Pier
The long-vacant 18th century buildings of Wigan Pier will finally be brought back to life, as a waterside destination.
It was made famous by George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 – but its new life will include a gin distillery, microbrewery, events venue and cultural hub.
The Locationist
Manchester has a rich history of being used as a filming location, including Peaky Blinders, Captain America, The Crown, and It’s A Sin.
The Locationist tour is set to launch early in the year and will show off the city’s top locations.
Bistro Marc
A great team effort by many at the Cumbria Clock Company bringing the Winters Clock House back up and running…a little more to do but nearly there… pic.twitter.com/jnsjnaVApd
There’s been painstaking work going on in Stockport, where the historic Winter’s building on Little Underbank is being turned into a new French restaurant.
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Bistro Marc will be a 70-cover restaurant spread over two floors that will serve French favourites, with a focus on using fresh local produce from Stockport Indoor Markets and other local suppliers.
Treehouse Hotel Manchester
That big brutalist Renaissance Hotel on Deansgate is being turned into a 206-bedroom hotel.
Forming part of the wider £200m redevelopment of the area, there’ll also be new retail space and room for pop-up food and drink vendors alongside the River Irwell.
Royal Exchange
Credit: Flickr
The magnificent Royal Exchange theatre has a packed year-long programme that will celebrate the joy of theatre, with bold plays, new writing and cast-iron classics.
Maxine Peake will star in a new show Betty! A Sort of Musical, while Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie will also come to the stage.
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Queer Contact
Queer Contact has been a staple of Manchester’s cultural calendar for more than a decade, but this will be its first year in its newly-transformed home.
Contact theatre on Oxford Road has undergone a £6.75m refurbishment.
The event in February will again be a celebration of queer culture and LGBTQ+ talent, including drag kings, comedy, variety, ground-breaking performance and the annual Vogue Ball.
Claus the Musical
There’s a world premiere in store for Salford, with a brand new Christmas musical debuting at The Lowry.
From the writer of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz comes Claus the Musical, telling the story of Claus and how he became an icon of our hearts and the skies.
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Manchester Open
The walls of HOME’s gallery will again be filled with work from the region’s artists, with more than 400 residents taking part.
Following on from 2020’s award-winning exhibition, almost 2,300 artwork entries were submitted for judging for its second outing and the resulting show promises to deliver an unmissable insight into the city-region’s local artistic talent.
Featured image:
Feature
Hardcastle Crags – the prettiest autumn walk in the North West with a great restaurant at the end
Daisy Jackson
This is the time of year where it’s particularly difficult to drag yourself off the sofa and into the great outdoors.
The weather isn’t quite crisp enough to feel festive and most of us (even the pumpkin spice latte, cardigan-clad crew) are missing the more reliable warmth of the summer months.
But autumn is here, like it or not, and it definitely has its perks.
One of which is the undeniable beauty the season brings.
It’s not just the blazing red, orange, yellow and brown leaves that suddenly take over the green spaces around the UK.
It’s also in the sunsets and sunrises that become so much easier to catch while the days are shorter (you have to admit, the commutes are prettier when they coincide with sunrise).
The riverside walk at Hardcastle Crags. Credit: Unsplash
And there aren’t many places better to soak in all the autumn beauty than Hardcastle Crags, just across the border in West Yorkshire.
The National Trust site sits between Leeds and Manchester and is a popular day trip destination for Mancs, given the trains that run regularly to Hebden Bridge.
A walking route around Hardcastle Crags at this time of year will take you through a landscape of blazing orange trees, babbling streams, and dappled sunlight.
When you catch a golden autumnal day the leaves will crunch underfoot, but even on a soggy day the leaf mulch has its own special kind of beauty here.
There are two walking routes between the main car park and Gibson Mill, a former 19th century cotton mill which is now home to a lovely cafe.
One will take you down to the river, where wooden boardwalks weave right along the water’s edge.
There are even stepping stones you can use to scamper across the river – a great Instagram pic, or just a way to keep the kids entertained for a few minutes.
A walk around Hardcastle Crags in Autumn. Credit: The Manc Group
The other route goes up through the upper woodland, where pine trees loom and you get a great view of the valley below.
For an easy loop, you can do both – a stroll through the trees, a stop for coffee and cake, then return along the river (or vice versa).
But with 15 miles of footpaths, you can explore way beyond that.
The National Trust’s list of walks includes everything from a wheelchair and pram-accessible estate track to peaceful woodland loops, to rocky scrambles and former railway lines.
And when you’re done with Hardcastle Crags itself, there’s a world-class restaurant in the gorgeous town centre itself.
Coin sits in the shell of the former Lloyd’s bank, with exposed brick and massive period windows, and specialises in natural wine and small plates.
When The Manc Eats visited, we found plates of freshly-cut meat and cheese served alongside ice-cold batched classic cocktails, where ‘quality is key, and it shines through on the plate’.
Our reviewer said: “With its higgledy-piggledy stone mill houses, surrounding woodland, hidden waterfalls and treasure-trove charity shops, Hebden Bridge is a popular attraction all of its own for those wanting to venture beyond the city. Coin is simply the cherry on top.”
In celebration of Momo Shop: a Chorlton favourite that has flourished since its rebrand
Danny Jones
It’s not often we go out of our way to hammer home just how staggering we found a restaurant, but after now losing track of the number of times that a member of our team has eaten at Momo Shop in Chorlton and come back near speechless, it deserves more than a review.
We regularly hold ourselves back and resist the urge to talk in superlatives wherever possible, especially because we worry we might be falling into the recency bias trap, but in this instance, we’re going to go out on a limb and fall on our hospitality sword. Well, this particular writer is…
It’s official: Momo Shop Nepali Street Food – for our money, anyway – is up there with one of THE best restaurants in Manchester right now.
And there are plenty of reasons why, not least of all because of the years of practice they have feeding increasingly discerning Manc diners under a different moniker.
Simple but charming – all the focus is on the foodAnd the food speaks for itselfSome of the most flavourful fillings you’ll find in ManchesterBusy any given night of the weekNo review (Credit: The Manc Eats/Momo Shop via Instagram)
If you don’t live in/frequent Chorlton, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that this gaff was a somewhat new addition to Chorlton, but in actual fact it’s been gradually growing a loyal and passionate following for more than seven years.
This is because before the miniamlist rebrand that saw the walls stripped back, the exterior painted blue and cutesy little bits of artwork hung amidst that familiar and atmospheric festoon lighting, Momo Shop was once The Little Yeti.
Its former iteration boasted hundreds of glowing reviews in its own right, which already plated up plenty of stunning Nepalese food, but since switching primarily towards serving a menu primarily made up of momos (Tibetan-style fried dumplings hand-folded into various shapes) they’ve well and truly shone.
Now approaching a full 12 months under the new name, the Nepali street food spot isn’t just one of a relatviely small handful considering how much great South Asian food there is across Greater Manchester, we’d wager it could be the very best representing that Alpine-Himalayan belt in our region.
Our latest visit was genuinely just as good as our first, second, third and so on – take your pick.
From the simply incredible deep fried pork dumplings and the deeply moorish butter sauce that goes with literally any momo filling, to the super traditional buffalo ones that are not only authentic but, come on, where else can you find such a unique meat in these parts? It’s some of the best food we’ve eaten.
And we don’t just mean of late; Momo Shop might genuinely among of the nicest scran we’ve had in ages and it’s no exagerration to say that the first taste we enjoyed from many of these flavours have formed some of the strongest culinary memories we’ve created in quite a while.
It’s also worth nothing that it isn’t just one main snack-sized dish. The chow mein, keema noodles and cheesy chops are showstoppers themselves, and we’ve already booked in again for a 30th birthday celebration purely so we can try those lambs ribs and their take on a shashlick.
Nevertheless, we love the idea of the numerous configurations and concotions by pairing different dumplings and owner Niti Karki gave us some pro-tips of the best duos and even let us in on the trade secret of her go-to combo when she’s hungover. Legend.
Once again, at the risk of sounding too hyperbolic, odd moments have felt like core foodie memories on a par with our favourite all-time meals.
Personally, I’m glad to report that this isn’t just a review: consider this a declaration that Momo Shop has quickly become my favourite restaurant not just in Chorlton but in all of central Manchester, something I haven’t had since the heartbreaking closure of Cocktail Beer Ramen + Bun in 2023.
Plenty of varietyDamn straightNiti = absolute iconWe’ll keep your condiment secret forever, Niti…
There might be an element of the almost HakkaPo-esque style drawings, the colour palette and the carefully curated pop-punk, old school emo and post-hardcore playlist that’s over half a decade in the making that makes particualrly partial to this place
But before we wrap up this glorified love letter parading as a ‘review’, we also want to give a special nod to the charming staff and Niti’s mum, specficially, who was too modest to even let us share her picture, but whose wealth of wisdom, influence and experience has clearly inspired Momo Shop’s success.
Don’t be shy, Sue – the only thing more stylish than the food was you, girl. Pop off.
Put simply, we’ll be going back here as regularly as possible until we try every different momo + sauce variation there is, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.
If you are in the mood for more dumpling excellence, by the way, you might want to check out the unassuming Northern Quarter gem that is Chef Diao.
Daisy Jackson -
26th December 2021 
