Jon Shard photographed Flesh throughout its five-year run at The Haçienda, documenting the monthly club night founded by Paul Cons and Lucy Scher in 1991. His photographs form a sustained visual account of queer nightlife in 1990s Manchester, encompassing its DJs, performers, promotional culture, clothing and crowded dance floor.
The first Flesh took place at The Haçienda on the 31st October 1991, before the night settled into its regular monthly slot on the last Wednesday of each month. Flesh transformed one of Britain’s best-known clubs into a large scale queer space at a time when gay and lesbian life in Manchester remained subject to political discrimination, police hostility and the continuing effects of the AIDS crisis.
Flesh was created by The Haçienda’s entertainment and promotions manager Paul Cons and independent promoter Lucy Scher. Scher had previously organised the Summer of Lesbian Love at the club, demonstrating both the demand for a different kind of lesbian nightlife and the scale of the audience that The Haçienda could accommodate.
Together, Cons and Scher established a night that placed gay and lesbian clubbers at the centre of the venue rather than at its margins. Although held midweek, Flesh regularly filled The Haçienda. Cons later recalled that approximately 1,200 people attended the opening event and that subsequent nights repeatedly sold out.
Its reach extended well beyond Manchester. “People came from London, people came from Scotland, you even had people from Europe coming over,” photographer Jon Shard recalls. “Imagine coming over from Europe for a night out on a Wednesday. It was one of the most important nights there. It was probably the biggest gay night in Europe.”
The success of Flesh arrived at an important moment for The Haçienda. The club had emerged from the acid house years with an international reputation, but was facing financial pressure, security problems and a changing audience. Flesh became one of its most successful regular promotions, bringing a distinct social and visual culture into the building.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Flesh developed within a city marked by both hostility and organised resistance.
Section 28 of the Local Government Act became law in 1988, restricting the ways local authorities and schools could address homosexuality. In February that year, tens of thousands of people marched through Manchester in one of the largest demonstrations for lesbian and gay rights Britain had seen.
The recent legacy of policing under Greater Manchester Chief Constable James Anderton also remained present. Gay venues and meeting places had been subject to surveillance, raids and harassment, while Anderton’s public statements about homosexuality and HIV/AIDS contributed to an already hostile political climate.
At the same time, Manchester’s queer communities were becoming increasingly organised and publicly visible. Clubs including the Number One and Paradise Factory established important social and musical networks. Manto’s glass frontage on Canal Street challenged the convention that gay venues should remain concealed from public view.
Flesh belonged to this wider transformation. It brought the confidence of Manchester’s developing queer club culture into the scale, sound system and visual environment of The Haçienda.
The night was neither a conventional gay disco nor a standard Haçienda event presented to a different audience. It gave queer clubbers control of the building and established its own door policy, musical programme, visual identity and social codes.
The provocative line printed on some tickets, “Management reserve the right to refuse admission to known heterosexuals”, reversed the forms of exclusion queer people routinely encountered elsewhere. Straight clubbers attended Flesh, but they entered a night whose terms were established by its gay and lesbian audience.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Flesh’s promotional campaigns were central to its identity. Posters and flyers used statements including “Queer as Fuck”, “Practice Makes Pervert” and “It’s Queer Up North”, reclaiming language commonly used against gay people and placing it prominently across Manchester.
The publicity was confrontational, humorous and deliberately difficult to ignore. It presented queer identity as public, confident and sexually autonomous rather than discreet or apologetic.
The connection between this language and Russell T Davies’s television series Queer as Folk has frequently been noted. The programme originally carried the working title Queer as Fuck before adopting a title drawn from the older northern expression “there’s nowt so queer as folk”. Flesh formed part of the Manchester culture in which such language had become increasingly visible and assertive, although the television title should not be attributed to the club night alone.
The phrase “It’s Queer Up North” was subsequently adopted by Manchester’s queer arts festival, extending the language associated with Flesh into the city’s wider cultural life.
Photo © Jon Shard, art direction Craig Johnson.
Music remained fundamental to the night. Flesh brought together house, disco and club records associated with queer dance floors, using the scale and technical resources of The Haçienda.
Its resident DJs included Tim Lennox and Dave Kendrick alongside Paulette Constable, Kath McDermott and Michelle Mangan. At a time when club DJ culture remained heavily dominated by men, Flesh gave women prominent and sustained positions behind the decks.
DJ Paulette is widely recognised as The Haçienda’s first female resident DJ. She began her residency at Flesh before developing an international career that included clubs and residencies in London, Paris and Ibiza.
Lucy Scher was particularly committed to the visibility of women within the night. Kath McDermott later recalled Scher repeatedly asking, “Where are the women?”, ensuring that female DJs, performers and organisers were represented in the programme and its publicity.
The DJs were part of a wider production involving fashion shows, drag performance, live appearances and themed events. Miss Flesh became an annual alternative beauty pageant, while visiting performers and promotions connected Manchester with queer club cultures elsewhere in Britain.
Jon Shard began photographing Flesh shortly after leaving college. Newly qualified in photography and looking for a route into the music press, he entered The Haçienda through friends and his association with photographer Peter J. Walsh. At first, he photographed the club entirely for himself. Those early pictures became a portfolio, which subsequently led to commissions from magazines including Mixmag.
“I started working Flesh through my work with Peter J. Walsh. He got me into the Haç,” Shard remembers. “My friends and the people around me would talk about it all month. It was always packed and full of energy.”
Kath McDermott remembers him working his way through the crowd with his camera. “Jon was keen as mustard,” she recalls. “He came over and explained why we should let him take some pictures at Flesh. He was even younger than me, and absolutely slayed it. An absolute darling.”
Shard was not the only photographer to work at Flesh, but he became one of its most consistent. He was present throughout its five-year run and developed a close working relationship with Paul Cons, giving him advance knowledge of the performances, themes and events planned for each night.
Flesh also offered him an unusually rich visual environment. “It was the best night to shoot due to the carnival atmosphere,” he says. “It was very colourful, and everyone spent two or three days deciding what to wear. I always brought a lot of film, knowing I would get some amazing images.”
By 1993 and 1994, The Haçienda’s Friday and Saturday nights were increasingly affected by violence and intimidation. Flesh attracted a different audience and maintained a social atmosphere that Shard regarded as markedly safer and more open than the club’s weekend events.
The distinction mattered photographically. The clothing, make-up, performance and preparation of the crowd made Flesh visually unlike any other regular night at The Haçienda.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Shard’s approach differed from much of the club photography being produced during the period. The prevailing style often relied on direct flash and tightly framed portraits, separating individuals from the architecture and atmosphere of the venue.
Shard instead worked extensively with The Haçienda’s existing light. Shooting on slide film, he timed his exposures to moments when the lighting rig opened across the room. Longer exposures allowed darkness to give way to sudden areas of blue, green and red, while photographing from a distance enabled him to show the scale and density of the crowd.
Some of the resulting photographs initially appear almost abstract, constructed from movement, light and mass. On closer inspection, individual faces and bodies emerge within the larger scene, each absorbed in the night.
Two photographs remain particularly important to Shard’s memory of the club. His favourite of all his Haçienda images is a blue-lit view across the crowd, made in the colour he still associates most strongly with the building and its lighting.
Another shows DJ Paulette working in the Gay Traitor, The Haçienda’s basement bar. “The green lighting really gives it that basement club feel,” Shard says.
Together, the photographs reveal different dimensions of Flesh. The blue-lit crowd communicates the scale and spectacle of the main dance floor. The photograph of Paulette shows the concentration and intimacy of the club’s smaller rooms, while documenting one of its central DJs at work.
The Gay Traitor also became a place where the night briefly encountered its own photographic history. Shard exhibited his Flesh photographs in the bar during Flesh itself, with clubbers drinking and dancing beneath images made at earlier events.
His photographs document a culture built through collective presentation. People face the camera alone, in couples and in groups, conscious of how they have dressed and how they want to be seen.
The clothing ranges from clubwear and sportswear to drag, leather, fetish clothing and costumes assembled for particular events. Flesh was not governed by a single style. Its visual identity was produced through the individual choices of the people who attended.
The photographs also preserve the physical character of The Haçienda. Ben Kelly’s industrial interior, its black-and-yellow columns, elevated DJ positions, bars and theatrical lighting remain visible around the crowd.
Shard’s camera was present during public performances and quieter exchanges. Some subjects confront it directly. Others remain absorbed in dancing, conversation or watching the room. Collectively, the photographs document how a temporary community formed across the course of each night.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
A significant proportion of Shard’s work from The Haçienda has not survived.
Because he photographed on slide film for magazines, original transparencies were frequently posted to publishers and picture desks. Many were never returned. Shard estimates that thousands of his Haçienda photographs have been lost.
The surviving images therefore represent only part of the work he produced inside the club. Their historical value is reinforced by the absence of the photographs that disappeared through the routine working practices of the music press.
Shard photographed Flesh with a clear sense that something significant was taking place. He had worked in clubs elsewhere, including New York, but regarded The Haçienda as a distinct environment and Flesh as unlike any other night he had encountered.
His sustained presence produced photographs of the DJs and performers, the outfits prepared over several days, the packed dance floor and the quieter spaces surrounding it. Together they form the fullest surviving visual record of the night.
Accounts of The Haçienda have often concentrated on Factory Records, acid house, Madchester and a familiar group of male musicians, DJs and promoters. Flesh has received comparatively less attention, despite its importance to the club and to Manchester’s queer communities.
The same imbalance has affected the recognition given to Lucy Scher, Paulette, Kath McDermott, Michelle Mangan and other women involved in programming, promoting and sustaining the night.
Shard’s photographs expand this established history. They show that The Haçienda of the 1990s was also a centre of queer cultural production, female musical authority, fashion, performance and political self-definition.
Flesh held its fifth birthday and final event on 30 October 1996. The Haçienda closed the following year.
By then, Manchester’s queer nightlife had expanded considerably. Flesh formed part of a broader transformation that included Canal Street, Manto, Paradise Factory, queer arts organisations and new club nights across the city and northern Britain.
The night cannot be credited alone with changing Manchester’s attitudes or institutions. Its importance is more specific. Flesh demonstrated the size, confidence and cultural influence of an audience that had previously been denied comparable access to major venues.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Since British Culture Archive began publishing Jon Shard’s Flesh photographs, the series has gained renewed public and institutional attention.
BCA has presented the work through its editorial programme, exhibitions, licensing and print editions. Selected photographs were included in Together As One: A Celebration of Manchester’s LGBTQ+ Community, BCA’s touring exhibition examining queer life, protest and nightlife in the city. The exhibition also included Peter J. Walsh’s photographs of the major anti-Clause 28 demonstration held in Manchester in 1988.
Photographs from Shard’s archive have now been selected for The 90s: Art and Fashion, Tate Britain’s major exhibition examining British art, photography and fashion of the decade, curated by Edward Enninful and running from 8 October 2026 to 14 February 2027.
Their inclusion places Flesh within a wider national history of 1990s photography, nightlife, art and fashion. It also reflects the growing recognition of photographs made within clubs and social spaces that established museums and archives did not necessarily document at the time.
Jon Shard’s photographs preserve the people who created Flesh, the work invested in each night and the ways Manchester’s queer communities claimed one of Britain’s most important cultural venues as their own.
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
Photo © Jon Shard / British Culture Archive
British Culture Archive represents selected works from Jon Shard’s Flesh series for exhibitions, publishing, licensing and print sales.
For image licensing, exhibition loans, research enquiries and access to the wider archive, contact British Culture Archive.
