Popular venue says it's the 'right time' to close

A popular Manchester experimental arts venue has confirmed it will be closing.

After more than a decade hosting experimental electronic and techno music, out of a white-brick garage - avant-garde venue The White Hotel, in Salford, said it will be shutting its doors for good in January 2027.

Famed for its underground culture and its eclectic range of artists - the club is now in a flood-risk zone, according to its owners - who said they decided they wanted to leave on their own terms.

"We've had a hell of a run these past 10 years," The White Hotel told the BBC. "But Rome never got to decide when it fell, we're getting to execute our own demise. The time just feels right for that.

"The team's energies are firmly on this final march to January in order to make it as magical as possible," The White Hotel said.

"Our rebirth is coming long before we close in the form of our first festival, The Black Lights, taking the very best of what The White Hotel does to the Lancashire coast, for a three day spectacle in Blackpool," the club added.

In Greater Manchester you are spoilt for choice of places to enjoy live music.

There are over 30 venues, each offering something of their own to the city's vivacious music culture.

But for many, The White Hotel stands above all others as the most unique, and – for a certain corner of experimental alternative musicians – the most significant.

It emerged in 2015, after an MOT garage was vacated on a Salford industrial estate. Ben Ward ran a record label, SWAYS Records, in the unit next-door, and this new empty space presented the perfect opportunity for somewhere to put on his gigs.

What started as a handful of events spiralled into something major for the city's music scene.

Gradually this near unnoticeable space in one of Greater Manchester's ostensibly most unremarkable corners developed a reputation for being one of the best places in the world to encounter the musical avant-garde.

With performances from big names, including Damo Suzuki, William Basinski and even hosting Andy Weatherall's last ever DJ set.

One of the city's recent break-out successes, the Stockport jazz-punk quartet, Maruja, sold out two nights there in April 2024 - and soon after announced a record deal with Music For Nations, a subsidiary of Sony.

For Manchester's music fans, ever insatiable for the bragging rights of having seen this or that band before anyone else, over the past few years it has been heaven sent.

In a live music landscape, which many fans criticise for becoming overly corporate and commercialised, here was a place where the DIY punk ethic could be breathed from the dust of its walls and felt from the heaving pulse of its legendary sound system.

A place of whispered renown and enigmatic secrecy, where literally anything might grace its smoky corner stage - the venue has developed a cult following.

Since hearing the news of its closure - keen White Hotel-goers have been expressing their devastation across social media.

"The White Hotel has been our home for the last ten years," one Instagram user said.

"The best club in the UK," said another.

"Life simply won't be the same," a third user added.

And previous performers at the venue felt similarly.

Ben, from Yaang, a local band who headlined and sold-out the venue in April last year, told BBC Radio Manchester of the unique nature of the venue.

He said: "It was just something sort of completely different from everything else.

"It had its own quite unique identity; the name was just enough to raise questions, the location, and everything.

"It's definitely going to be missed, and [it leaves] a big hole in the city that hopefully something can fill quite soon."

Ewan from The Cutter, a Greater Manchester band who supported New York rock band Bambara at the venue in April last year, said the venue will be "sorely missed".

He added: "It's certainly a unique place.

"To play there it was a bit of a dream come true, definitely one of the [venues] that are sort of immediately on your list when you come to Manchester to play.

"It means loads to the Manchester scene, it'll be sorely missed, because it's just completely unique, it's got a real DIY feel to it."

Outside of live music and DJ sets - the club has received national attention for some of its more alternative artistic performances - from one-man theatre shows to a reenactment of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 2018.

The latter of which reportedly included an imitated smashed up car, the arrival of a coffin in an Uber, an "exorcism", and a Mexican mariachi band performance of Elton John's Candle in the Wind.

The event was widely discussed in the media - and was labelled, "bizarre" and "odd" by VICE and Manchester Evening News respectively - while other outlets, including the Mirror, reported the event as "sick and disgraceful".

More recently, the White Hotel opened another Manchester site - a bar, book and record shop in New Cross.

Named Peste at the time of its founding in 2021 - the site has been renamed three times since - and is now named Impiety Hour.

Playing The White Hotel has been at the turning point of the careers of so many northern artists in the alternative sphere - leaving a gap now for the next generation of the stylistically estranged to find a home.

But with The White Hotel's inaugural festival, The Black Lights, coming to Blackpool in June, the venue's closure will clearly not be a goodbye forever.

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