Welcome to Unmissable our weekly digest of the stories we think you might have missed.
Pics of Love Boutique in the Northern Quarter , Manchester . The last sex shop in the area . 04 July 2025
Colin Gibson runs Love Boutique, the Northern Quarter’s last sex shop. And it’s fair to say in his 20 plus years in the business he’s heard all the wisecracks there are to hear.
The two lads look like they’ve wandered in on their lunch break. ‘If I buy that and it’s too big can I bring it back?,’ asks one, pointing to a pretty large marital aid hung on the wall. “Yeah, of course you can,” replies Colin Gibson with a grin and his tongue firmly in cheek. “The second-hand stuff sells better.”
Welcome to Unmissable, our weekly digest of the stories we think you might have missed.
This weekend we published Damon Wilkinson’s brilliant read on the last remaining sex shop in the Northern Quarter. As an assignment, hanging around outside a sex shop waiting for the queue at Rustica to die down so you can dive through the pink bead curtain of Love Boutique can’t be an easy one. But once inside the shop Damon got a fascinating insight into the changing nature of the adult industry and the Northern Quarter.
This isn’t really a story about a sex shop, it’s more a piece of social history about the changing face of the Northern Quarter.
“There wouldn’t be a Northern Quarter without the sex shops,” says Colin. “Back then all it was was sex shops and bars”.
You may have noticed that this weekend there was a small gig in Cardiff.
Ahead of the main event in Heaton Park this coming weekend we revisited the last time that Oasis played in Manchester and everything went wrong – let’s hope it goes better this time.
Also this weekend we published an extraordinary food review from What’s On editor Jenna Campbell, rather like our story about a sex shop that wasn’t a story about a sex shop this food review was something a bit different.
A moving immigrant story, a love story with some geo-political perspective thrown in – it’s a bit special.
Local democracy reporter Nick Jackson is a master of the art of capturing the Vox populi and this week’s story was no exception. He visited the town of Altrincham to find views still wildly divergent on whether the town should rightfully be in Cheshire or Manchester.
I’ll leave the final word on the subject to one 56-year-old woman who did not wish to be named: “It doesn’t really matter,” she said. When I was younger, I thought it was important, but I don’t now.
“There’s so much to be proud of about being part of Greater Manchester. And there’s so much more to Manchester than people realise. We are so lucky. Before anyone slags off Manchester, why don’t they go and have a look?”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
Inside the Northern Quarter’s last sex shop
Love Boutique in the Northern Quarter
Slowly the sex shops that had been part and parcel of the Northern Quarter since the 70s began to close, until Covid finally killed them off. All, that is, except one. Damon Wilkinson went to have a peep behind the bead curtains of Love Boutique. Read it HERE.
The Oasis Heaton Park gig that broke the generator – and the band
A message on the big screen at Heaton Park apologising for the ‘technical difficulties’ which halted the opening night concert the last time Oasis played in Manchester(Image: M.E.N/Paul Simpson)
Within two months of the huge 2009 homecoming gigs the biggest band of a generation was no more, Damon Wilkinson reports on a fearsome gig that marked the beginning of the end. Read it HERE.
From Chiang Mai to Bolton, a love story
“The food truck has been the Thai Food Van since we took over, it used to be a buttermilk trailer”(Image: Sean Hansford | Manchester Evening News)
Jing Jai café opened a few months ago on Bradshawgate in Bolton but has been more than 30 years in the making. Read it HERE.
‘We should’ve stayed in Cheshire – putting us into Greater Manchester was the biggest mistake ever’
A summer’s day in Altrincham. But should it be in Cheshire or Greater Manchester?
People in the little town divided over which county they want to be in. Read it HERE.
Owens Park Tower the building where ‘so many sordid memories’ were born
Students at Owens Park Tower in Fallowfield in the 1980s(Image: Jeni and Paul Carr)
Outlandish pranks, seances, drinking games and wild nights of music and dancing. Read it HERE.