Manchester's Big One

The Big One, for the uninitiated, is a massive student pub crawl, held annually for the last few years along Manchester’s most famous studenty street – Oxford Road – and on into the infamous Deansgate Locks. It is, by all accounts, a messy affair – close to 5,000 students, all dressed in the same t-shirt (the t-shirt, bought for £10, is effectively your ticket – no t-shirt, no entry) all with the aim of getting as obliterated by alcohol as possible. Students getting pissed is, of course, not a new thing but the last Big One has cause a stirring in the realm of officialdom, after complaints by city centre residents and reports of lewd and unruly behaviour.

People were pissing in the streets, apparently, and making noise outside flats. Then The Big One started and more people were doing it. Isn’t that what happens when you live in a city centre? Anyway, no one got seriously hurt or anything but some residents complained so a bloke from the council who might have some say in these sort of things has said he’ll investigate – by going on the next Big One himself to see what it’s like. Nice image – a 50 something year old suit mixing it up with the young, crazy students. We might go down ourselves, purely in the name of research you understand.