This year sees Flapjack Press really grasping the nettle of popular poetry with an array of titles from such household names ...

Fibres and patterns are embedded in the surfaces and stories created by the ceramicist Hannah Sulek. We talk to her to find ...

As we approach the end of 2025, we’re looking back at the things that have brought us immense comfort during the year. For the team at Northern Soul, books were once again a source of great joy, and ...

The Floral Pavilion sits out on the edge of New Brighton, facing the Mersey with Liverpool’s docks looming across the water. Around it, the place holds that familiar seaside mix: arcades, food stalls, ...

May Payne, a singer/songwriter based in Manchester, is an intricate painter of vulnerability, trauma, and love. Nowhere is this more evident than in her first EP, a radically vulnerable offering of ...

Bernard Butler is at pains not to be misconstrued. This interest in (and poetic appreciation of) the bucolic is, by Butler‘s own acknowledgement, a more recent awakening; one which he describes in ...

When Yorkshire-born Kieran Hodgson joined the cast of BBC Scotland’s hit comedy series Two Doors Down, he decided to go “all in” and relocate with his partner to Glasgow. “I haven’t done a show for ...

For the British Textile Biennial 2025, artists and makers filled spaces – which previously, directly or indirectly, powered Lancashire’s cotton industry – with stories of innovation in textile ...

It all began with Charlie Williams. Less well remembered these days than some of his peers, the former footballer was, in the early 1970s, Britain’s best-known black stand-up, having been promoted ...

Manchester Film Festival closes with exactly the right kind of film. Not something inflated for the sake of a finale, but a work that catches hold of one of the festival’s deeper currents. California ...

My first visit to Shakespeare North in Prescot felt oddly close to home. It’s not far from where I grew up, though Prescot itself always felt like another world. Jim Cartwright’s Two has also ...

There’s an episode of the 90s hit comedy Father Ted where the lads on Craggy Island are visited by Father Damian Lennon, a young Dublin priest and pound-shop Liam Gallagher, who you know is rebellious ...