Did you know there’s a place in Manchester where you can learn to cook, take up gardening, join a running club, learn photography, try your hand at skateboarding, knit, knot, draw, make things from wood, and (genuinely) much more?
Altogether Otherwise is the brainchild of Ben Young and Joe Hartley who have been responsible for all sorts of creative community ventures in the city for years.
They describe it as ‘a place that celebrates the sheer restorative joy of doing things for fun’, adding that they ‘specialise in aimless pursuits that will help you to lose track of time’.
In short, it’s not like anywhere else in the city, and call it an event space at your peril. In fact, they prefer the term ‘hobby house’.
The concept is simple; they provide a space for people to join, or start, a whole host of different clubs – from ceramics to sci-fi, via cookbooks and woodwork. There’s a whole calendar of weekly and monthly events which are entirely free to join.
Everything at Altogether Otherwise is about making the most out of leisure time, rather than making anything in particular. The antidote to ‘hustle’ culture, where hobbies are monetised and productivity is maximised, they positively delight in amateur enthusiasm, and the barriers to entry are non-existent, whether it be pickling veggies or picking up a skateboard for the first time.
The space is, essentially, three rooms: two small, one big (painted eye-wateringly bright blue and used for exhibition launches, parties and the like). Everywhere you look there’s the debris of fascinating creative projects: in one corner a table is stashed with gloriously mismatched, handmade ceramic cups for an upcoming coffee festival.
There are books and sculptures and tools and cables. So many cables. One of the most striking features of the space though is the garden. Originally a carpark, the team have reclaimed it as a sort of wonky allotment, full of flowers, vegetables and yet-to-emerge creative projects. Here you really get a sense of the proximity to the hustle and bustle of the city, and specifically Shudehill and Victoria, where a new skyscraper racing up the skyline is no rare occurrence.
Joe, who runs the Evening Gardening Club (Tuesdays at 6pm), explains that it’s a constantly-evolving thing: “We try to focus as much as possible on the gardening rather than the garden.” He explains that they ‘don’t have a design for the garden we’re trying to achieve, it’ll never be about that’.
Instead, a group of gardening enthusiasts gather to build beds, plant vegetables and do all manner of useful pottering which may or may not bear fruit (literal or otherwise) in seasons to come. Even though when we spoke to Joe and Ben, the nights were drawing in and winter was palpably in the air, the gardening club showed no sign of slowing down.
Evening Gardeners were making sculptural seed heads out of bamboo cane. It’s about the process, rather than the end result. Similarly, Joe explains, somewhat elliptically, there’s a ‘club that revolves around wool, but it isn’t a knitting club’.
At the same time that the Evening Gardening Club gets together every week, the Eat The Frog running club meets and heads out on their weekly 5K around the city centre. Described as a ‘community of creatives, wellness and runners’, it’s another facet of the Altogether Otherwise ecosystem which is a whole community in and of itself.
Joe tells us that one of the most rewarding things about facilitating space for loads of different clubs at the same time is seeing friendships form, which then exist beyond the clubs themselves.
“Sometimes I’ll be out and about and see people hanging out who I met at one of the clubs, which is really nice,” he says. And there’s an amount of club crossover too, people who are keen to come and try one of the crafty clubs might then become comfortable to try out one of the sporty ones, and vice versa. Injured runners tend to drop in at Evening Gardening Club while in recovery, that sort of thing.
So what’s next? There are some one-off collaborative events coming up, off the back of the success of September’s ‘An Apple Gathering’. An outdoor, day-long celebration of the red and green crunchy things in Sadler’s Yard, the ‘apple-fuelled party’ promised ‘apple-forward dishes and hands-on workshops in apple growing and preparation’.
Hundreds of people came down and participated in apple pie making, juice pressing, woodworking, cider tasting, apple bag making and even apple juggling. It was an entirely wholesome testament to how a good idea can have many joyous executions.
The next multi-faceted event in the calendar is ‘Altogether Brewing‘ on the 15 and 16 November, a ‘decentralised coffee celebration for roasters, brewers, importers, producers and the consumer’. It will be typically multi-faceted, bringing together roasters, cafes, restaurants and big names in coffee tech for an entirely free coffee soiree.
November will also see the beginning of an ambitious, month-long collaboration with Sam Buckley’s celebrated Stockport restaurant Where The Light Gets In restaurant called A Play In The City. There’ll be making workshops and talks as well as pop-up dining, in a fittingly eccentric deconstruction of what a restaurant even is.
As well as all that, they reckon they could probably squeeze in a few more clubs. Ballet was definitely mentioned. Calisthenics too. The sky’s the limit. They’re actively looking for people to pitch new club ideas to them.
You don’t have to be a pro to do so. In fact, that’s entirely the point.
Read more:
Schofield Brothers to open a new bar
Music mental health charities launch new initiative
New members club to open in Manchester
