Vada Vada, a queer-led bar and kitchen on Wakefield Street, will close its doors on Friday 16 October after just five months. The owners described the decision as coming with "great sadness" after a "short but incredibly sweet journey".
Farewell party planned
The venue regularly hosted LGBTQ+ events including club nights, quizzes, cabaret and poetry sessions. In a social media post, the team confirmed their story at the venue was ending and gave details for farewell drinks, thanking customers for the "love, the memories and the magic".
In the post, the team wrote: "Well, this isn't quite how we imagined our story ending...It's with heavy hearts that we announce Vada Vada will be closing its doors."
They added: "It's been a short but wonderful adventure, filled with laughter, music, dancing, fabulous people and memories we'll treasure forever. We're incredibly sad to say goodbye, but immensely grateful to everyone who helped make our little corner of Manchester feel like home."
The team also said they were planning "one last party" on Friday 16 October and invited customers to join them "for a farewell drink, a dance and a hug". They said they were in touch with promoters and organisers to try to find new homes for upcoming events so they could still go ahead.
Three venues in three years
The site on Wakefield Street has been home to three different bars in the last three years. Legendary student nightclub Font occupied the site for 22 years until early January 2023, before it became Irish bar Mother Mary's, which opened in June 2025 and ran for almost 18 months. In late May, it opened as Vada Vada.
Led by Leigh and Kathryn Downs, the inside of Vada Vada was rebuilt from the ground up with new murals and artwork, a fresh lick of paint and a whole rebrand when they took over the venue. Volunteers from the community, including members of the Dyke Agenda collective, helped get it running in time for the May launch.
Before opening, Kathryn told the Manchester Evening News: "I’d been looking for a little while to open a venue that serves the queer and trans community in Manchester. Ever since I’ve been in Manchester, I felt there was a real need for a space where the trans community could call it their own."
Leigh, who worked at Mother Mary's before and helped coordinate queer-friendly events, said there had been a great response to those events, which led into the creation of Vada Vada. "When Mother Mary’s closed, there were a lot of people who reached out to me to say they had lost their safe space - which was really upsetting to hear," Leigh reflected. "I wanted to take the community that I’d help build up and continue uplifting it into this bigger thing."
