Unseen photos of comical eating contest capture Manchester's lost way of life

A set of images unearthed from the Mirrorpix archives offers a glimpse of Manchester many of us have never seen.

The photographs show what appears to be an incredibly popular eating contest taking place on Canal Street long before it established itself as Manchester's Gay Village. The food in question is a now largely shunned delicacy from Manchester's past, namely tripe.

Tripe, not to beat around the bush, is the edible stomach lining of farm animals – mostly cattle, sheep and pigs with beef tripe being the most common. If that doesn't get you salivating, you were probably just born in a later generations where its popularity has dwindled.

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Tripe was a nutritious and cheap dish for the British working classes from Victorian times until the latter half of the 20th century. And while it is still popular in many parts of continental Europe, the number of offal (internal organ meat), including tripe eaters in the UK, has rapidly declined.

So it might not feature on too many plates these days, but just 50-years ago there were hundreds of tripe shops and stalls across the north of England. So popular was the foodstuff, regular eating contests were held whereby a the first to finish a slithering plateful first was declared a champion tripe eater.

One such competition was captured in a brilliant set of photographs found in the Mirrorpix archives recently. The images show a tripe eating contest taking place on Canal Street in Manchester on April 23, 1975.

Not only do the photographs show what looks to have been a lively day of