A brand new, totally free festival will spill into venues in Salford later this year.
The We Invented the Weekend festival will bring together class acts from the worlds of sports, music, comedy, theatre, dance, workshops, talks, food, charity, wellness, crafts and more.
There’ll be everything from water sports on the canal, to community feasts, to workshops, to vintage markets, to live music, right across MediaCity and Salford Quays.
The event has been created in partnership with some cultural heavyweights from the city, including the BBC, The Lowry, the University of Salford, the Royal Horticultural Society, Eat Well MCR, Science and Industry Museum, The Open University’s Business School, HOST, Salford Community Leisure, Salford CVS, Sounds from the Other City and hundreds of community organisations.
The inaugural festival is set to take place across the weekend of 10 and 11 September. It promises to be ‘a festival by the people, for the people’.
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We Invented the Weekend will take over Salford venues – and its waterways. Credit: Supplied
The inspiration for We Invented the Weekend goes all the way back to 1843, when the actual concept of a weekend was invented right here in Greater Manchester.
Robert Lowes (Salford Lyceum director, workers’ rights activist, and also Sir Ian McKellen’s great grandfather) campaigned to win workers the right to leisure time on Saturday afternoons.
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A full programme for We Invented the Weekend will be announced in the coming months, but already confirmed is CBeebies Live Bedtime Stories, the BBC Philharmonic, events at The Lowry, activities at the Science and Industry Museum, and gardening activity from RHS Bridgewater.
We Invented the Weekend will suit all ages. Credit: Supplied
Sounds from the Other city will also pull together a music partnership, expanding from their Chapel Street base to the Quays for the first time.
The Salford Weekend Orchestra with the BBC Philharmonic will invite people across the city to join a mass community performance, with all instruments and abilities welcome. The piece will be composed by Michael Betteridge (artistic director of The Sunday Boys – Manchester’s LBTQ+ low voice choir), and performed in the MediaCity Piazza during the festival.
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Hundreds of community organisations, including cheerleaders, bakers and disco dancers, have been invited to take part.
Key people and organisations involved in developing the festival are Wayne Hemingway MBE who is creative director; Salford’s City Mayor Paul Dennett; Tom Stannard, chief executive of Salford City Council; Julia Fawcett OBE, chief executive of The Lowry; Gwen Oakden, development director at The Lowry; Controller of BBC Radio 5 Live Heidi Dawson; Marketing Manchester’s international marketing director Victoria Braddock and MediaCity place director, Josie Cahill.
Wayne Hemingway MBE said: “The weekend is an intrinsic part of the rhythm of life. It’s hard to imagine life without the weekend, yet less than 180 years ago it didn’t exist. Happily, Sir Ian McKellen’s great grandad put an end to life without it.
“Greater Manchester can rightly claim to have invented the weekend and is a place that knows how to celebrate it. Whatever your bag, be it boxing or box sets, crafts or cricket, dancing or digging, reading or raving, swimming or samba, kicking back or letting loose, whatever free time means to you, MediaCity and Salford Quays is the place to be on September 10th and 11th for what has all the ingredients to become THE national celebration of free time.”
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Paul Dennett added: “The City of Salford’s motto and the name of our strategy for culture, creativity and the arts is ‘Suprema Lex’, which means ‘The Welfare of the People is the Highest Law’. The welfare of the people of Salford is paramount, and as the cost of living rises, We Invented the Weekend is set to deliver a programme of essential free cultural and creative activity that is open to every community across our city.
“We Invented the Weekend will be a great spectacle, reflecting our proud social history, whilst also animating the fantastic public realm at Salford Quays in true Spirit of Salford style.”
High School Musical at Lowry, Salford – a night spent reliving our childhood | Review
Amy Williams
What a night spent reliving our childhood.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate or seem biased, considering this is one of my favourite film trilogies of all time, but this could be the best stage show I’ve seen in a long while.
We all know how High School Musical goes, right? Set at East High, we follow Troy and Gabriella (the star basketball player, and the geeky new girl) who meet over New Year, and then become ‘star-crossed lovers’ when back at school as they’re part of two different ‘cliques’.
The duo mess with the ‘Status Quo’ when they audition for the school musical. But will they stick to what they know? Or become stars of the stage? I’m sure you know the ending.
High School Musical is currently on stage at Lowry, Salford / Credit: Matt Crockett (Supplied)
From the costumes and the characters, to the memorable songs (there’s actually 52 songs in this production, including a mega mix at the end), they’ve kept right to the script of the films – and that’s exactly what we wanted to see.
Of course, the biggest throwback of them all is Kaycee Stroh – who originally featured as Martha Cox in the film trilogy – taking the role as Ms Darbus, and she was just as incredible as we expected her to be. And to see her do the iconic dance in the finale was unbelievable, 13-year-old Amy was screaming.
Also featuring Jason Donovan as Coach Bolton, Tobias Turley as Troy, Leonor Correia as Gabriella, Caitlin Tipping Sharpay, and Luke Bayer as Ryan, it was a proper impressive cast all round.
It’s a night to properly relive your mid-00s childhood / Credit: Matt Crockett (Supplied)
There was crowd interaction right from the off, as they taught the crowd a cheerleading routine to be included later in the show, plus for the finale, they had the lyrics on the big screen too so everyone could sing-along.
If we could go and see this show every single night, we would – it is absolutely brilliant.
All Brewers Fayre and Beefeater locations across the UK are closing down
Danny Jones
It looks to be the end for not one but two of Britain’s best-known and long-running restaurant franchises, as Brewers Fayre and Beefeaters will be closing down all of their locations.
Dating back to the mid-1970s, there will soon be none left anywhere in the country
The pair of recognisable chains, owned by parent company Whitbread PLC – who also own Premier Inn, hence why they usually come as a joint package – have nearly 200 sites across the UK, but they are already in the process of a wholesale shutdown.
News of the impending closures first began circulating back in April, but now the process is said to be fully underway, with multiple Greater Manchester names on the chopping block.
A real shame all brewers fayres are closing down. As a member they’ve sent me a last free main. So enjoying a mixed grill pic.twitter.com/EIHMZ7LCvv
— Daniel Turner⚽️ 🏟️ 1️⃣1️⃣5️⃣8️⃣ (@puffpuff65) August 4, 2026
With roughly 3,800 staff set to be made unemployed as part of the major restructuring by Whitbread, the job cuts will see approximately 12% of their workforce laid off from a total of around 30,000.
One local duo due to face the music is the soon-to-close Stable Gate in Denton and Wheatlea Park in Wigan – both of which are Brewers Fayre branches.
89 of the brand’s boozers have been given until early September (some dates may vary) to shut up shop and hold not just their last orders, but their final dinner service full stop.
The rest of the venues closing next month are Beefeater pubs, including the Heaton Park one in Crumpsall, The Quay House at Salford Quays, and the Whitgate Inn over Oldham way.
As for others nearby, Macclesfield’s Springwood Park is also set to close.
The older of the two British mainstays is Beefeater, which was founded by Whitbread back in 1974 when they opened their first pub, The Halfway House, down in Enfield.
Brewers debuted up North in ’79, with a maiden watering hole called The Farmers Arms in Preston, before going on to open several locations around Lancashire and eventually nationwide.
Most of you will likely have visited or at the very least passed one of those food and drink spots in your time, and while they may be more associated with hotels and service stations these days, they still served as regular haunts for plenty of people who will no doubt be gutted to see them go.
Speaking of services, another big name is expanding further into the North West.
Daisy Jackson -
18th May 2022 
