The Haçienda

Factory Records and New Order opened the Haçienda on 21 May 1982 in a former yacht warehouse on Whitworth Street West. For its first years it mostly lost money and was often half empty. Then Chicago house arrived, and Mike Pickering's Friday night and later the acid house summers turned it into the most famous club in Britain. Its fame came with violence around the door and with drugs inside, and by the mid 1990s the problems were closing in. It lost its entertainments licence in June 1997, carried on briefly as an art gallery, went bankrupt and shut for good. Peter Hook has said the club lost up to 18 million pounds over its life, New Order's money doing a lot of the subsidising. The building stood empty, was demolished in 2002 and became The Haçienda Apartments, which is a joke nobody planned. We could not find a capacity figure worth printing. Every house record label in Britain is working in the space it opened up.