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Poll 2022: The Warehouse Project
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The Warehouse Project at Depot Mayfield
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Location: Manchester, England 

Capacity: 10,000

thewarehouseproject.com

Less club per se, more concept that flipped the British nightlife script upon launch in 2006 by introducing a seasonal rather than year-round format, Manchester’s Warehouse Project has called many monstrous spaces home, its longest tenure in the arched belly of a car park beneath Piccadilly Railway Station. Pre-pandemic action moved around the corner to the cavernous Depot Mayfield, a sprawling, industrial complex that can comfortably fit more bodies than the 10,000 tickets that consistently sell out — with the huge, usually non-ticketed food and drink area, Freight Island, also forming part of a site which stands at the centre of a wider £1billion redevelopment project transforming a half-forgotten corner of the city. 

Evidence of how shrewd event founders and entrepreneurs Sam Kandel and Sacha Lord are, the latter’s rise to prominence as Greater Manchester’s Night Time Economy Advisor and, more recently, appointment as Chair of the Board of Directors at the UK-wide Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) further betray how much impact The Warehouse Project juggernaut has had both locally and nationally. Business talk aside, the core programme focuses on massive weekend sessions and this year will run from late August through to New Year’s Day, with that calendar pockmarked by one-offs like the Repercussion festival. Global headliners are a given — Bonobo, Eric Prydz, Disclosure and Jeff Mills play 2022’s first few weeks alone — as is world-class production, while support for the wealth of talent based in the region also regularly factors.