Manchester: European Capital of Piss 2008

I’ve just come back from Manchester city centre. The whole place stinks of piss. People appear to have been sleeping in the NCP car park on Oxford Road. There are empty beer bottles and pizza boxes strewn around between the BMWs and the odd empty bog roll on the ground. I suppose twenty quid for parking is cheaper than a hotel.

Manchester doesn’t exactly emerge from the staging of the UEFA Cup Final with much credit. The police initially told Rangers fans to stay at home unless they had a ticket, then decided to wholeheartedly reverse that position by employing a softly-softly approach that allowed at least 150,000 football fans (possibly 200,000) to spend all day getting drunk in the city centre. This is despite the fact that Manchester ordinarily has strict rules about public drinking. Everyone must have thought it seemed like a good idea - right up until the point when a riot broke out.

I was speaking today to a Man United fan who went to Rome to watch the quarter final of the Champions League against Roma in April. The authorities there prevented alcohol from being sold in central Rome at all that day. All the fans were marshalled into a park outside the main business area. They could get out if they wanted to - but since no-one would serve them a beer, most of them went back to the park for an afternoon kip.

Obviously, Rome would have seen less than 5% of the influx that descended on Manchester yesterday but surely something simlar could have been worked out. After all, there’s a big, supercasino-sized open space right next to the stadium where the match was being held.

Someone else told me that the car lift in their office block had stopped working this morning. They suspected that a few gallons of Glaswegian urine had made it into the electrical system last night. And according to Manchester Confidential, there were “rivers” of piss around Piccadilly, Albert Square and Cathedral Gardens. Sorry to get hung up on this wee-wee issue, but has the council not heard of portaloos? They have them at Glastonbury, which is another place where hundreds of thousands of drunk people often turn up during the early summer. Installing some might have been an idea.

The pay-off, of course, is the vast sums of cash that have rung through the tills of bars and pubs in the city centre. Cityco, the city centre management company, says:

The huge invasion of fans for the most part had a very positive impact on business in the city centre. Hotels were full, bars and clubs did excellent trade, as did catering establishments. Early reports from mainstream retailing show that some had hoped for better trading results, but others did very well. Harvey Nichols and Selfridges has had two ‘very good’ trading days and had no problems with fans. Foodstores also did very well.

The message, then, is that although tens of thousands of drunks dumping a hundred tonnes of rubbish on the pavement, urinating in doorways, snorting coke in the street in broad daylight and (in isolated pockets) smashing things and people up, isn’t necessarily a good thing, just think of the turnover at Wetherspoons. On the other hand, I know of at least one small-ish business that shut up shop at 3pm yesterday so staff could escape the escalating carnage.

The council says there won’t be a big screen for the Champions League final next week. Horses? Stable doors? Anyone?

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