The Temple

Located just off Oxford Street, in the bowels of Great Bridgewater Street, you’ll find The Temple, a former public toilet that’s been quietly getting on being one of Manchester’s best dive bars for as long as anyone can remember.

Much like its sister bar, Big Hands, The Temple has a grimey-cool vibe that many places have gone to great expense to replicate. The bar feels naturally well worn, like an old pair of gig-battered Converse or a patched-up denim jacket, not the ones you buy pre-dressed from a high street chain store, but the real deal.

For gig-going Mancunians and visitors to the city, it’s a bar that feels like a right of passage. Here, hundreds of young bands have sat and drunk the night away making plans for world dominance. The Temple is the ‘hole in my neighbourhood’ which then-local patron Guy Garvy sang about in Elbow’s Grounds for Divorce. As you’d expect, the jukebox is great and the selection of world beers in both bottles and on tap is too, but there’s just something about the atmosphere and the vibe that feels special.