Frank Turner and Music Venue Trust lend support as Manchester’s Retro Bar faces closure due to redevelopment

Frank Turner and Music Venue Trust (MVT) are lending their support to Manchester’s Retro Bar as it faces closure due to redevelopment.

• READ MORE: UK losing grassroots music venue every fortnight as industry demand “action not words”

The 35-year-old venue, located in Manchester’s city centre, is under threat due to the impact of the Sister Masterplan development, a joint £1.7 billion venture between Bruntwood SciTech and The University of Manchester.

The development will see Retro Bar demolished in August, and they are prohibited from trading from July 2025. Though they were offered two alternative sites from their landlords, representatives for the venue say they were “wholly unsuitable”, and they have “only been offered a small financial contribution”, which is “a fraction of the cost we face to move site, recover lost business and keep staff employed.”

Retro Bar, which is the only business to be displaced by the development, has hosted early gigs from Turner, Everything Everything and The XX, and is deemed the official birthplace of The Chemical Brothers, being the space where they started DJing in the early 90s.

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Now, Music Venue Trust are calling for the venue’s protection. “The redevelopment of Greater Manchester, and all towns and cities, must include recognition and significant support for existing cultural businesses, it’s just not good enough to dismiss the extraordinary value these organisations bring to their communities, the cultural ecosystem and the night time economy,” the charity said in a statement.

“Music Venue Trust is in ongoing dialogue with the venue team, Manchester City Council, Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Bruntwood SciTech, and calls for all parties to work towards a solution that secures the future of Retro in a viable new location and prevents the loss of this important and well-loved venue.”

They’ve also shared a Crowdfunder with a target of £50,000 to help work towards a solution that secures the venue’s future “in a viable new location and prevents the loss of this important and well-loved venue.”

Within the Crowdfunder, Turner has commented on the venue’s impact on his career. “The Retro is where I played my first solo show in Manchester,” he said. “Without venues like this, I would never have been able to build my career up to the point of headlining the Academy earlier this month.

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“The people at the heart of organisations like Retro dedicate their lives to developing skills and theirs are the first ears on new music discovery for the future of our music scenes. What these vital spaces provide are stages for musicians to develop their skills, learn their craft and a pipeline on to bigger things. They run off passion.

“The cultural value of this space alone cannot be underestimated,” he continued. “It is becoming a common thread seeing city centre grassroots music venues forced to close due to redevelopment plans. If we don’t raise our voices on this matter, it won’t be long before emerging musicians will wonder where they can play their first gig. They cannot start without them.”

Meanwhile, Everything Everything added: “Everything Everything played two of our very earliest gigs at Retro Bar, and before that we’d played it in more embryonic bands, embracing Retro’s vital training ground. There are fewer and fewer of these essential resources nationwide, and Manchester must protect Retro Bar and her ilk, if we want to remain the music city we are celebrated as globally.”

The news comes amid starling figures about the UK’s live music scene in recent years. This January, for example, figures showed that the UK lost one grassroots music venue every two weeks in 2024 – with nearly half making a loss and 200 remaining in a state of emergency.

In November, it was also reported that the country’s grassroots music scene is said to be facing “complete collapse” without urgent help and government intervention.

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