Welcome to Bolton

Bare minimum

Taking a seat inside a popular central Manchester bar, I scroll my finger down the menu, deciding what to order for lunch. Opting for a double cheeseburger and fries, it comes in at what I consider to be a reasonable £16. To wash it down I order a pint of pale ale, another £5.90 – above the Greater Manchester average of £4.57 (according to the latest data from CGA) but it feels like decent enough value to me. Coming in at just shy of £22, it’s pretty much what I’d expect to pay for a sit-down lunch in the city centre. Despite being one of the 50 per cent of earners who takes home less than the median UK salary, this doesn’t feel like an extravagance.