Manchester has a temple. To enter it, you descend a flight of stairs beside Great Bridgewater Street.
There is no steeple, no sermon, and nobody standing at the door to enquire about the condition of your soul. The place is called the Temple of Convenience. It occupies a former underground public toilet.
Quite a promotion for a building. An interesting career move for the congregation.
The first thing to admire is the name. Most businesses in reused premises make a great performance of forgetting what the premises were previously used for. A former warehouse becomes a loft. A factory becomes a creative quarter. An old bank becomes a restaurant where the bill still induces a certain amount of anxiety.
The Temple has declined to play that game. Its name remembers the plumbing. If anything, it has made the plumbing part of the invitation.
Imagine the original conversation. Not the actual one — I have no minutes from the meeting — but the sort of exchange that must cross somebody’s mind when a city closes a public convenience:
“What shall we do with this underground room?”
“Well, people are already accustomed to going down there when they need something.”
“Excellent. What if we charge them for something entirely different?”
Manchester managed it in 1996. Rafe, the founder, has described how closures of public toilets in the early 1990s sent him looking at the city’s abandoned underground spaces. He proposed turning one into a bar. The result is tucked beneath the pavement, a place of roughly thirty-five people, depending on whose estimate of comfort you choose to believe.
Thirty-five is a splendid number for a temple. Enough to constitute a congregation; too few to establish a respectable schism.
From above, the entrance scarcely announces the room below. A canopy, iron railings, steps descending out of sight. The city carries on overhead. People attend to their very serious business while a different kind of business is conducted beneath their shoes.
Cities have always had rooms under other rooms. Cellars, storage chambers, forgotten passages, small theatres where the ceiling and the performer must negotiate terms. What makes this one unusual is not merely that it was repurposed, but that its old purpose remains impossible to ignore.
That may be the finest thing about it. A good joke improves with an audience that is allowed to know what the joke is.
The Temple became part of Manchester’s music life, with a jukebox and a reputation for nights that were not especially concerned with being described the following morning. It appears in accounts of the city’s musicians and small venues. Elbow’s Guy Garvey is connected to the place in the story behind the band’s song “Grounds for Divorce.” You do not need to know the song to appreciate the geography: it is unusual for a bar to be literally underground and still find its way into the city’s musical memory.
Think about the ordinary ambition of opening a venue. A person usually seeks exposure, a large window, visibility from the street. Here the business model began with invisibility. You had to descend to find out what was going on. That is either a serious disadvantage or the most efficient form of curiosity marketing ever devised.
Of course, the word convenience has had to do some extra work. A public toilet offers a service for which the need is not optional. A bar offers a service for which the need is sometimes passionately argued but rarely legally established.
The distinction matters. A clever conversion does not, by itself, replace the civic facility that disappeared. Not everyone who needs a public toilet wishes to purchase a drink. Some may be strongly opposed to purchasing the particular drink that would make a return visit inevitable.
Still, the afterlife of this small room is worth noticing. Buildings are given names and functions by people who are often convinced those functions will last. Then a budget changes. A business closes. Someone takes a fresh look at the stairs. A room which once demanded privacy becomes a place where privacy is difficult to obtain.
A person who has never set foot in Manchester can understand the essential scene. A modest entrance. A flight of steps. A narrow room where strangers gather beneath the city and music comes out of a machine. A ceiling close enough to have opinions about anyone raising their arms.
The place has survived long enough to acquire something no interior designer can order in bulk: a past that people keep talking about. You can buy old fittings, distressed timber, a lightbulb that pretends it has endured several wars. You cannot purchase thirty years of people making the same joke and finding, each time, that the next visitor has not heard it.
Perhaps that is why its origin does not need to be concealed behind a more dignified story. Dignity has rarely been a reliable measure of a room’s usefulness.
Manchester once asked people to go down those steps for relief. Now it invites them down for a drink.
The plumbing has changed. The need for relief, apparently, has not.
Things on the table
For the historical record: the Manchester Digital Music Archive documents the founder’s account of the conversion in 1996. The Oxford Road Corridor records the venue’s place in the city’s music culture. Hidden Manchester preserves a lead to historical photographs of the former public conveniences. The imagined exchange in this essay is a comic invention, not a recorded conversation.