For three decades, anyone passing the corner of Princess Road and Moss Lane East would have seen little to indicate what had once stood there. Beneath an undeveloped patch of grass lay the remains of one of Manchester’s most significant postwar clubs.
The Reno occupied the basement of the building from 1962 until its closure in 1986. It was known for imported American soul and funk, resident DJs who played until five or six in the morning and a community of regulars drawn from Moss Side, Hulme and working-class districts across Manchester.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
Its importance, however, extended beyond nightlife. The Reno was a Black-owned venue in a city where racial discrimination restricted where people could live, work, meet and socialise. It became particularly important to a generation of mixed-race Mancunians who found in the basement a large and visible community with shared experiences.
The building was demolished in 1987 and its basement filled in. As Manchester’s international music history became increasingly associated with Factory Records, the Haçienda, acid house and Madchester, the Black clubs, DJs, record shops and sound systems that preceded and contributed to those developments received considerably less recognition.
The Reno survived through the memories and photographs of its former regulars. In 2016, playwright Linda Brogan began bringing those histories together through Excavating the Reno, a community-led project combining recorded testimony, archaeology, photography and exhibition-making.
Phil Magbotiwan opened the Reno in 1962 in the basement of a Victorian building at the corner of Princess Road and Moss Lane East. Its sister venue, the Nile, occupied the floor above.
Magbotiwan was a Nigerian-born businessman, and the venues he established reflected the changing population of Moss Side and neighbouring Hulme. Manchester’s African and Caribbean communities had grown during the postwar decades, but racial discrimination remained widespread. Colour bars operated formally and informally across employment, housing, pubs and entertainment venues. Black men and white women in relationships frequently encountered hostility, while their children grew up within a society that often treated mixed-race identity as a social problem.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
The Reno created a space in which these communities could meet. It originally opened as a live music venue, with calypso among the music performed there. Accounts of its early years recall appearances by Lord Kitchener, the Trinidad-born calypsonian who lived in Manchester for part of the postwar period.
During the day, older African and Caribbean men gathered to play cards, dominoes and pool. At night, the building formed part of a wider network of Black social clubs, shebeens and late-opening venues offering music and company beyond the restrictions of mainstream Manchester nightlife.
By the 1970s, the Reno had developed its defining character. Descending into the basement meant entering a self-contained social world with its own customs, hierarchies and recognised personalities. There were dancers, card players, footballers, students, artists and older regulars dressed in carefully chosen suits.
Respect and social standing had to be earned. Certain tables and groups were well established, and people noticed who arrived, who danced, how they dressed and who they were seen with. Some came every week. Others arrived after the pubs and city-centre clubs had closed, continuing the night until dawn.
The club’s heyday, generally identified as the period between 1971 and 1981, coincided with the coming of age of a generation of mixed-race Mancunians born mainly during the 1950s and early 1960s. Many were the children of African or Caribbean fathers and white British or Irish mothers.
Their family histories connected several communities, while racism could leave them marginalised within wider British society. For some regulars, entering the Reno was the first time they had encountered a large group of people with comparable backgrounds.
Linda Brogan, who is Jamaican-Irish, began going to the club as a teenager in 1976. “The closest description I can give is Goodfellas when they walk in, and you’re either in or out,” she recalled. “Being our colour was an absolute badge of honour; you were definitely in. The Reno was our theatre.”
The strength of that recognition becomes clearer when placed against what regulars experienced elsewhere. Former customers have recalled being refused entry to city-centre clubs through openly racist door policies or invented regulations. One man remembered being told that his Afro was a fire hazard.
Black and mixed-race young people also experienced racist abuse in public and repeated attention from the police. Inside the Reno, they could meet, dress, dance and form relationships within a social environment shaped largely by their own community.
Regulars often described the club as an extended family, although this did not mean it was without friction or internal rules. Its social life also extended beyond the basement. The Reno had its own football team, Afroville, whose players and supporters carried the club’s friendships into matches and social events elsewhere in Manchester.
Relationships formed at the Reno developed into marriages and families. The music became connected not only to particular nights but to the personal histories of the people who heard it.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
Music was central to the Reno’s identity. Persian became one of its defining resident DJs, drawing on his Jamaican background and knowledge of American records as the club moved away from its early live programme towards recorded soul and funk.
His selections included American soul, funk, jazz-funk and album tracks that were not widely heard elsewhere. The Reno’s DJs did not simply play established favourites. They introduced dancers to unfamiliar imports, extended album cuts and records that could become associated with the club before finding a wider Manchester audience.
Records were often sourced through Spin Inn, the influential Manchester import shop. Regulars listened carefully to what was being played and searched for the same records afterwards. The connection between shops, DJs and dance floors was central to the circulation of Black American music through the city.
Persian was joined over the years by DJs including Coolie and Hewan Clarke. When the Haçienda opened in 1982, Clarke became its first resident DJ, establishing a direct connection between the Reno and the venue that would later become central to Manchester’s international music history.
The Reno was not an early version of the Haçienda. Its audience, history and social purpose were distinct. Clarke’s appointment nevertheless demonstrates that Manchester’s later club culture drew upon Black DJs and musical networks already established across the city.
The Reno’s late opening hours also distinguished it. Because the club continued until five or six in the morning, it became a place where different parts of Manchester nightlife converged. Regulars shared the basement with musicians, students, artists, sportsmen and people continuing evenings that had begun elsewhere.
Muhammad Ali visited the Reno during the 1970s, a story supported by photographs, family testimony and the recollections of people who met him. Snooker player Alex Higgins also became a familiar visitor, while Tony Wilson reportedly held his stag celebration at the club.
These visitors contributed to the Reno’s mythology, but they were not the source of its importance. The club was defined by the people who returned each week, developed its music, maintained its friendships and made it part of everyday life in Moss Side and Hulme.
A 1984 photograph by Matthew Rich also documents princess road and the New Reno sign alongside a Bob Marley fly-posting campaign.
The Reno existed within a neighbourhood experiencing intense racial, economic and political pressure. By the late 1970s, relations between Greater Manchester Police and sections of Manchester’s Black community had deteriorated significantly.
Young Black and mixed-race men reported repeated stops, searches and arrests, together with racist language and violence from individual police officers. The suspected-person offence, widely known as “sus”, became closely associated with this treatment.
Derived from the Vagrancy Act 1824, the offence allowed a person to be arrested on suspicion that they intended to commit a crime. Its use against young Black men became the subject of sustained national opposition. In January 1981, the government introduced legislation to repeal what Parliament described as the “much criticised suspected persons offence”.
Moss Side responded to these experiences through music as well as political organisation. In 1980, local reggae group Harlem Spirit released Dem a Sus (In the Moss), directly addressing the treatment of young Black people in Moss Side and Hulme. The record forms part of the area’s wider history of reggae, sound systems and music as political expression.
In July 1981, long-standing tensions contributed to two nights of confrontation in Moss Side. The events were widely described at the time as riots and are increasingly discussed as an uprising. No single cause explains what occurred. Unemployment, inadequate housing, racial discrimination and deep distrust of the police all shaped the conditions in which the disturbances developed.
Research held by Manchester’s Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre has since examined how those events were reported and whose accounts were treated as authoritative.
The Reno was not a political organisation, but it occupied the same streets and served many of the communities affected by these conditions. Its importance lay partly in providing a social environment defined by music, friendship and community rather than by the suspicion encountered elsewhere.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
By the mid-1980s, the Reno building had deteriorated. Concerns were raised over fire safety and access to the basement, and Manchester City Council declared the property unsafe in 1986. The Reno and the Nile closed, and the building was demolished the following year.
Its disappearance formed part of a wider period of physical change across Moss Side and Hulme. Streets, housing and longstanding social spaces were cleared, rebuilt or redeveloped, altering the geography through which local communities had formed and maintained their networks.
The Reno basement was filled in and the land remained undeveloped. Without a building, plaque or permanent marker, little on the site communicated the history beneath it.
The club also occupied a marginal position within established accounts of Manchester music. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the city’s cultural identity became closely associated with punk, Factory Records, the Haçienda, acid house and Madchester.
These histories remain important, but they do not represent the full development of Manchester nightlife. Black clubs, shebeens, sound systems, import shops and DJs had already created extensive musical networks across Moss Side, Hulme and the city centre. The Reno belonged to that earlier and interconnected history.
What survived after demolition was dispersed across personal photographs, family albums, friendships and stories. It was this informal body of material that Linda Brogan began to assemble more than thirty years after the club closed.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
Brogan conceived Excavating the Reno after returning to the former site and finding almost nothing there to indicate the club’s existence. She initially considered writing a play, but concluded that no single script could contain the number of voices or the range of experiences she wanted to document.
In 2016, with support from Arts Council England, she began filming interviews with former regulars. People spoke about the music and nights out, but also about childhood, family, racism, interracial relationships, policing and growing up mixed-race in postwar Manchester.
Many participants had never discussed these subjects with one another. The interviews allowed personal experiences to be recognised as part of a wider shared history. Brogan later documented the project in a first-person account for Historic England.
Research suggested that the basement had been filled in rather than completely destroyed. In October 2017, Brogan worked with former Reno regulars, Manchester City Council and Salford University’s Applied Archaeology team to excavate the site.
The dig became both an archaeological investigation and a reunion. People who had not met for decades worked alongside professional archaeologists, uncovering sections of the kitchen, walls and dance floor.
Objects recovered from the site included bottles, tins, wallets, dice, cosmetics, perfume containers and fragments of the club’s interior. Individually, these were ordinary objects. Their importance came from their location and from the testimony of the people who had used the building.
The archaeology provided physical evidence, while the interviews and photographs explained how the space had functioned socially. Together, they connected the material remains of the club to the memories of its community.
At the end of the excavation, the exposed remains were illuminated and the site hosted an all-night celebration. Original Reno DJs played for former regulars, their children and grandchildren. The club’s community danced once again on the floor that had remained buried for thirty years.
The project was not simply a reconstruction created for an external audience. Former regulars played a central role in deciding how their history would be collected, interpreted and presented.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
Material from the project was presented at the Whitworth in November 2017. Photographs of regulars, recorded testimony, excavation footage and recovered artefacts entered the gallery, while Reno DJs played in its main hall.
From March 2019 to March 2020, The Reno at the Whitworth developed into a year-long collaboration between Linda Brogan, former regulars and the gallery.
Photographs, artefacts, music, film and material from the Whitworth’s own collection were brought together within a living exhibition. Former regulars were active participants in the project rather than appearing solely as subjects within a history interpreted by others.
The collaboration challenged the conventional distinction between material already recognised by cultural institutions and histories preserved informally within families and communities.
The excavated material has since entered the University of Manchester Library’s Special Collections. The Excavating the Reno Archive contains approximately 500 items, including physical artefacts, testimonies, photographs, administrative papers and documentation relating to the excavation and exhibition.
The movement from personal memory to excavation, exhibition and institutional archive is central to the Reno’s later history. Material that had survived for decades across private collections now forms a public research resource for the study of Manchester, race, music, community archaeology and postwar British social history.
Photo © Linda Brogan\@excavatingthereno
Most of the surviving photographs of the Reno were made by regulars, friends and family members rather than commissioned photographers. They show people posing outside the building, sitting around tables, preparing for nights out, playing football or gathering beside the DJ booth.
Sometimes described as vernacular photography, these personal snapshots document who was present, how people dressed, what the rooms looked like and how members of the community represented themselves.
An architectural photograph could have documented the Reno as a building. These photographs document it as a community. Expressions, clothes, gestures and relationships carry information that could not be recovered from the physical site alone.
The same principle informs The People’s Archive®, British Culture Archive’s crowdsourced collection of photographs documenting everyday life in twentieth-century Britain. Family albums and personal collections frequently preserve histories that were never commissioned, collected or documented by established institutions.
When these photographs are brought together and properly contextualised, they can expand the public account of British social and cultural history.
The Reno photographs are particularly significant because the building no longer exists. Together with the interviews and excavated objects, they allow the club to be understood through the people who used it, rather than only through its address, licence or eventual demolition.
The Reno belongs within the wider history of Black British social spaces, postwar migration and modern club culture. It was founded by an African migrant, sustained by Black and mixed-race communities and shaped by records moving between the United States, the Caribbean and Britain.
It also belongs within a specifically Mancunian history. Its DJs, dancers and regulars contributed to a culture of late-night clubs, imported records and musical exchange that developed before the venues most commonly associated with Manchester’s international reputation.
Recognising this history does not diminish the later importance of Factory Records, the Haçienda or acid house. It provides a broader and more representative account of the networks from which the city’s club culture developed.
The Reno mattered because it enabled people who were frequently marginalised elsewhere to occupy and shape a social space of their own. It provided room for friendships and relationships to develop, gave DJs the freedom to introduce unfamiliar music and created a meeting point across generations and districts.
Its recovery has been equally significant. Through Linda Brogan’s work and the participation of former regulars, the Reno moved from private memory into public history without losing sight of the community that created it.
The building disappeared in 1987. Thirty years later, the basement was still there. Through its photographs, testimony and the work of its former regulars, so was the history it held.
