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The exterior of Cruz was used in the series as the backdrop for fictional club Babylon and when the show premiered in February 1999, it served as another eye-opener for the LGBTQ+ community. Named Queer As Folk, the show chronicled the lives of a group of gay men living and socialising in Manchester's gay village - and it was crucial that it was filmed on location. Just six years into Cruz’s grand opening, the producers of Channel 4 came circling around the village with the idea for a brand new series that would be written by Russell T Davies. More than 400 people walked through the city centre in protest at the time, saying the raids had been a 'major setback for community relations'. In 1994, police raided the 'Mineshaft' club and arrested thirteen people on suspicion of obstruction and gross indecency. 'Next-generation', subterranean music venue with a members' club is opening in Manchesterīut while more opportunities and venues for the LGBTQ+ community were opening up, there was still some hostility to the way things were going.Steps gig at Platt Fields off as BeeU Festival cancelled.I think we were a real eye-opener for the gay community.” Read More Related Articles Things weren’t painted black and kept in the shadows, we were bright, colourful and very different to others. We were very fortunate, we were one of the first mainstream clubs to open. But right from the get-go, demand was massive. “It was mostly run down buildings and it certainly wasn’t the metropolitan area it is today. “When we first opened, this area was like a red light district,” he explains. The two bars alone were showing that the village was turning over a new leaf.
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Once Cruz gets its claws into you, you can’t get away.”Ĭruz opened two years after Manto, with its big, booming windows that ensured no clubber was dancing in the dark. I eventually started working more and more at Cruz and the rest, they say, is history. We put the bridge and barge in that’s still there now, and we had restaurants in Liverpool and Leeds too. “We had a chain of bars called Met which started on the canal opposite what is now On Bar. “I was involved in Cruz’s sound and lighting from the beginning. “I was an electronic engineer and worked for a company which sorted out the lighting,” he explained.
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Gerrard first joined the club as a sound and lighting engineer after working on a restaurant venture in the village already associated with the owners of Cruz. When we opened, customers had to apply for membership 48 hours in advance so there was no turning up at the door and just walking in - it had to be very well-planned if you wanted to come to Cruz.”Ĭruz 101 was described as being one of the first commercial clubs to open in the gay village (Image: Cruz 101) "We ended up at the high court in London where we were granted a licence but we were given specific conditions which meant we could only have a members-only licence. They declined our application for our licence so we went to the local magistrates court to appeal the decision and it was turned down a second time. “They couldn’t fathom the idea at the time.
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“We struggled to get a licence from the very beginning because the council couldn’t understand how there could possibly be a need for a place so big for gay men to go to,” general manager Gerrard Woods, who has been with the club since 1993, told the Manchester Evening News. Almost instantly, queues lined the streets as people tried to get in on the action but, just months prior to opening, there was every possible chance that Cruz would never even become a reality. When the doors to the two-storey club opened, Cruz was greeted with open arms.
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READ MORE: Legendary vodka bar to get HUGE makeover in time for Jubilee celebrations The lack of blacked-out curtains and a bold aesthetic made sure, from the moment you walked in, that you knew this was something completely different. Once a shipping warehouse, the building of Cruz 101 had been stripped of its interior and replaced with a nightclub like nothing Canal Street had ever seen before. The retirement of Chief Constable of Greater Manchester James Anderton in 1991 - who once described gay men as ‘swirling in a cesspit of their own making’ - only helped with that optimism. Just six years earlier, the bars neighbouring Cruz had been raided by police on an almost-weekly basis in attempts to catch gay men and arrest them for gross indecency.īut the 90s came with new ambitions and a better hope of equality. When Cruz 101 first opened its doors on Canal Street on May 22, 1992, it was heralded as the next big thing.