Host a Pub Quiz in Manchester

Red brick, soft rain and a room that loves a scoreline.

Manchester does rain the way other cities do weather: patiently, sideways, without fuss. It darkens the red brick of Ancoats to the colour of strong tea and puts a shine on the setts along Castlefield, where the canals slide under the railway viaducts and the old warehouses have learned to be flats. Somewhere a tram bell goes, and a worker bee stares back from a bollard.

This is a city that built the modern world in cotton and then talked about it for two hundred years, so it knows a thing or two about a room full of people with opinions. On a wet Tuesday the pub quiz is where those opinions go: teams named after half-remembered B-sides, a picture round passed round like contraband, and someone at the back insisting the Hacienda question was worded unfairly.

None of that happens by itself. It happens because someone stood up with a microphone and a clipboard, the same way someone plugged in at a Northern Quarter gig or tried out ten new minutes above a pub in Chorlton. The city has never been short of people willing to get up and do a turn. It only needs the rest of us to come in out of the rain and watch.

What a Manchester quiz room wants

Music is non-negotiable. A room here will argue about Joy Division, the Smiths, the Stone Roses and Oasis longer than about anything else, so a music round or a Name That Tune slot earns its place. Football is the other live wire: split it fairly between red and blue, or keep it general and let both halves of the room groan together.

History lands well too, because people here know it: the mills, the Ship Canal, Peterloo, the suffragettes, Turing and the Baby computer. Midweek is quiz territory, and a warm pub is never more welcome than in November. Keep the teams to six, read every answer out clearly, and leave time for the sheet to be marked properly.

Keep Manchester's rooms live

Background music never heckled anyone back. A quizmaster does, and the good ones read the crowd, makes the regulars laugh, spots the new team in the corner and gives them a shout. That is the same craft that keeps the city's open mics, comedy nights and small gig rooms going, and all of it depends on people turning up on a weeknight.

So back the locals: the hosts, the bands playing to thirty people, the comics trying out new material. No quiz at your pub, club or office social yet? The Manchester round on this page makes a decent first ten questions, and the rest can be printed from Trivia Show Maker for nothing.

A free Manchester quiz round

Ten questions about Manchester, free to use at your next pub quiz. Read them out as they are, or load the round into Trivia Show Maker to add it to a full show and print the answer sheets.

Which insect has been a symbol of Manchester since the days of the cotton mills?
Which band, formed in Manchester and led by the Gallagher brothers, released "Wonderwall"?
Which long-running ITV soap is set in the fictional town of Weatherfield?
Thanks to its many mills, Victorian Manchester earned which nickname?
The world's first inter-city passenger railway, opened in 1830, linked Manchester with which city?
Which Manchester record label, co-founded by Tony Wilson, released Joy Division and New Order?
The 1819 attack on a peaceful crowd at St Peter's Field is known by what name?
Which suffragette leader, who founded the Women's Social and Political Union in Manchester in 1903, has a statue in St Peter's Square?
Which codebreaker and computer pioneer, who worked at the University of Manchester, is remembered with a statue in Sackville Gardens?
Manchester City's home ground was originally built for which multi-sport event in 2002?

Show the answers

The worker bee
Oasis
Coronation Street
Cottonopolis
Liverpool
Factory Records
The Peterloo Massacre
Emmeline Pankhurst
Alan Turing
The Commonwealth Games

Load this round into Trivia Show Maker Browse full trivia shows