The first Manchester Munch

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Posted by Tanos on Tue 5 Feb 08, 11:58 PM

Next Saturday is the 10th Anniversary Manchester Munch and I thought I'd write a bit about the first Manchester Munch and how it came about.

The very first munch in the world was in April 1992 in Palo Alto, California at the heart of Silicon Valley. Palo Alto is Stanford's university town and had one of the highest concentrations of internet users, which in BDSM terms meant access to the newsgroup alt.sex.bondage. STella, the munch's organiser, hit on a winning formula that first time, which subsequently spread round the world: the organiser (STella) announced the time (evening) and place (Kirk's burger bar) of the munch on an online BDSM forum (alt.sex.bondage), said everyone was welcome and then turned up to see who else would come. Following the pattern of the initial "BurgerMunch" at Kirk's, other places in the US with alt.sex.bondage users started to announce their own munches, and I think it's true that every local BDSM forum will eventually spawn a munch if there's not one there already.

The first UK munch was quite early in all this - July 1994 in London - but didn't become a regular monthly event. More munches were held in the UK, but it was another online space - IRC chat rooms - that eventually spawned a regular munch, although it wasn't under that name. These were the meetings of #submissionuk IRC chatroom regulars organised by Searcher in the upstairs room of the White Horse pub in Soho on the second Saturday evening each month, starting sometime in 1996.

In June 1997 I took the train from Manchester to Euston, spent a day nosing around Bloomsbury and Charing Cross Road bookshops, and then summoned up my courage to walk into the meeting room of the White Horse. The #submissionuk meetings had the unfortunate habit of facing newcomers with a wall of faces and the request to "guess our online nicknames" which I managed to stumble through (munch meeters and greeters take note ) Once I'd settled down to actually talking with people I enjoyed it, and ended up staying past the last train and spending the night reading in Euston station. I think some people were heading off to the Gate that night (which is a membership based club) and I was vaguely aware of Skin Two magazine and the Rubber Ball and the existence of other fetish events and presumably shops, but there was no obvious way to discover all this then - although with hindsight, a copy of Skin Two or a fetish shop carrying flyers would have been a good place to start, if I could have found one.

Back in Manchester, I started thinking about organising a munch here, and since I'd been reading alt.sex.bondage since 1993, I knew how munches had spread across the US once the idea got going properly, and didn't see how it would be different in the UK.

Also in 1997, the UK got its own BDSM newsgroup, uk.people.bdsm, but that didn't produce any munches that year (or really advertise the #submissionuk ones.) There were some discussions about events outside London on #submissionuk in the autumn, but it wasn't until I'd made two more trips to London that the first Manchester Munch was organised, for Saturday 7th of February 1998.

I spent the last few days of January driving around near the M6/M62 junction looking for a suitable venue, as I expected most people to come by car. Eventually, I found the Rope and Anchor pub on the A57 near the outskirts of Warrington, which served pub food and had a mix of seating areas and lots of parking. I also took the decision to call it a "munch" from the start, unlike the London #submissionuk meetings, as it made it easier to explain as I could link to all the US sites talking about their munches. I did think about how to make us easier to find in the pub: some US munches used black balloons, but I thought that would raise too many questions so came up with a Manchester A-Z map book instead.

The first munch was publicised in IRC chatrooms and by emails and was attended by eleven people. This seemed quite a lot at the time, and the well established London meetings were getting only 2 or 3 times as many.

What's even more striking now is how far many people had travelled: some had come from the highlands of Scotland and London, as well as south and west Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside.

The second munch took place a month later and was publicised in uk.people.bdsm too this time, and coincided with the trickle and then flood of munches spawned by that newsgroup. This first of these was the Sheffield Munch that took place the Sunday after the second Manchester Munch in March. Initially most of the uk.people.bdsm munches were one-offs, but eventually almost everyone settled down to a monthly formula and people became less and less keen about travelling several hundred miles just to see other BDSM people face-to-face.

The Manchester Munch has taken place every month since, staying at the Rope and Anchor through the spring and summer, having a one-off at the Balearica bar in Charles Street to coincide with the Pride March, and then moving to its current venue at Via Fossa in Canal Street in the November of 1998. With the demise of the #submissionuk meetings a few years later, it is now the UK's longest running munch.

I think there were birthday cakes only at the first two anniversaries (February 2000 was the last one I co-organised before stepping down) but it looks like this tradition will be revived this year

Edited Wed 6 Feb 08, 2:50 PM by Tanos


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