Afflecks began life as Affleck & Brown, a genteel Victorian department store where Manchester ladies shopped for gowns and furs. It closed in 1973 as the city's retail gravity shifted elsewhere.

Nine years later, two hairdressers named James and Elaine Walsh took over the vacant building and turned it into something rather different: a four-storey labyrinth of independent stalls offering punk clothing, goth accessories and anything else the mainstream preferred to ignore.

That reinvention didn't just save a building. It helped create an entire neighbourhood, the Northern Quarter, around it. Today, over 70 traders occupy the maze-like floors, selling vintage clothing, vinyl, crystals, tattoos and things that resist easy categorisation.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours of Manchester use Afflecks as a landmark in the Northern Quarter, tracing how this stretch of old industrial Manchester was reborn through creative enterprise, with Afflecks as the unlikely anchor of that transformation.