Food Poverty Action Plan aims to tackle hidden crisis in GM

The latest estimates are that 620,000 people in Greater Manchester are living in poverty, and struggle to put food on the table. Of those, around 200,000 are children experiencing food poverty. £30 billion per year has been cut from welfare budgets since 2010. By 2020, Local councils will have lost 60% of central government funding […]

Manchester clubs together in solidarity with Leeds charity

Across the Pennines, on the outskirts of the city centre of Leeds, a special party has been running regularly for the majority of the last decade. Known as Cosmic Slop, the events have achieved critical acclaim in their own right as a politically charged, progressive party – purposely without a prescribed music policy their eclectic […]

Henge: Attention Earth! album review

Fresh on the heels of a full summer of festival appearances, local Manchester band Henge release their first album, Attention Earth! How does their frenetic and psychedelic cosmic dross fare when transported from sweaty, heaving festival tents to more placid domestic situations? I sat down with a cup of Valerian Tea to find out… Touchdown The […]

Play shares a message of HIV positivity

A new play tours Greater Manchester this month, spreading a message of HIV positivity and helping to break down the stigma surrounding the now controllable virus. ‘I Am Because We Are‘ will bring theatre out into the community, using churches, community centres and drop-in centres for refugees and asylum seekers. Seven of the ten boroughs […]

What’s on in Manchester and the North West

As autumn takes a proper hold, the Manchester events calendar always seems to get busier and busier. Here are some highlights for the rest of this weekend and beyond: YES Opening Parties – Fri 21 – Sun 23 September Charles Street, Manchester YES celebrate their opening with free parties all weekend. Saturday’s bands and DJs include London […]

Bluedot Festival celebrates sounds, science and sustainability

Manchester University’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, the site of many scientific discoveries which has been nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, will once again host the award-winning Bluedot Festival of discovery this weekend. Proceedings kick off in spectacular fashion on Thursday 19 July when the Halle Orchestra perform ‘The Blue Planet in Concert’, a special […]

Manchester bands rock German festival in intergalactic style

The long-standing, alternative, anti-capitalist and strongly anti-fascist Fusion Festival was this year graced by storming sets from two of Manchester’s most beloved underground electronic music bands. Held on a former soviet air base in Lärz, North East Germany, Fusion Festival is billed as four days of ‘holiday communism’. With a strong ethos of diversity and inclusion, […]

Creative buying at Lush looks beyond the bottom line to reduce e-waste

Lush looks to implement its ethical approach to buying raw materials for its cosmetics range into technology projects, to avoid producing toxic electronic waste. Where Lush leads others may follow and help reduce the global burden of e-waste, which particularly affects certain African countries such as Ghana, where a lot e-waste is dumped. The interview […]

Burnham’s battle to end rough sleeping by 2020 – can he do it?

Andy Burnham’s pledge to end rough sleeping by 2020 played a large part in the campaign which saw him become the Mayor of Greater Manchester ten months ago. Burnham inherited a growing homelessness and housing crisis which has seen the level of rough sleeping rise 13-fold in Manchester since 2010, with the problem escalating quicker […]