The huge warehouse ‘neighbourhood’ with the city's biggest beer garden set to become Manchester's hotspot this summer

“You can see why we’re calling it a neighbourhood, right?” says Dan Mullen, one of the founders of Ramona and The Firehouse. With Adelaide Winter and Joel Wilkinson, they launched the outside-inside Detroit pizza and BBQ chicken-meets-vogue-runway spot on the site of an old MOT garage on the edge of Ancoats and the NQ in the middle of lockdown.

Their new project is a different ball game. Actually, it’s a different sport altogether. ‘Neighbourhood’ does indeed fit the bill, and this site is pretty much as big as one. They’ve taken on the former Presbar Diecast works, just beyond the arches which once housed the Warehouse Project, between Ducie Street and Store Street.

And it’s enormous, spread over 250,000 square feet. You could fit many, many Ramonas inside it, and still have room for an Olympic size swimming pool and a couple of football pitches. Maybe three football pitches. It’s bewilderingly huge.

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Previously, anything you needed moulding out of aluminium, you could get made here. They used to make everything from alloy wheels and machine parts to the wing mirrors for Lamborghinis.

But come the summer, this vast factory floor will be a place to meet, eat, drink, possibly dance, and, if you need some office space, work too. Called Diecast - what else? - it’ll also be available to use for anything from music videos to movie and TV sets to glitzy award ceremonies and other creative events.

The place will be able to fit 5,000 people indoors and across its huge garden space, which you’ll pass through from the entrance gates on Ducie Street. They reckon when it’s up and running it will have created upwards of 500 jobs for the city.

But it wasn’t