The Waggon and Horses
Long before it was Mulligans, this was The Waggon and Horses, a Victorian pub and inn on Southgate serving locals and travellers. After the war it was a Wilson's Brewery house, known for its bitter. The building has been here for over 170 years, tucked just off Deansgate on a street most people walk past without turning down. In the early 1990s, the pub took the name Mulligans and embraced Manchester's Irish heart. The pub calls itself Manchester's oldest Irish pub, resting on the age of the building rather than the name above the door.
In 2013, Pádraig Brady, a Dubliner and an accountant with no pub experience, turned left instead of right at the corner of Southgate, walked into a tired Mulligans by accident, and bought the owner out six months later. What followed was a quiet transformation. Not, at first, of the building, which stayed low-lit, snug, and wood-panelled, but of the standards. Brady invested close to £100,000 over three years in a fully independent Guinness dispense system, separate from the main cellar, designed to do one thing properly. Brady says the pub now shifts around 13,000 pints of Guinness a week, over half the draught sold. The result is a pint which the Harp Guide lists and independent reviewers rate as the best in England.
The Guinness
The Guinness Harp Guide 2026, published in December 2025, named just 35 pubs across Great Britain that consistently serve exceptional Guinness. Mulligans was the only pub in Manchester city centre to make the list. Schooner Scorer, the viral Guinness reviewer, gave it 9.2 out of 10. Daragh Curran, the self-titled Guinness Guru, gave it 8.4, the highest score he has ever awarded outside Ireland, and said it was poured to perfection and would sit alongside the top five pubs in Dublin. In January 2025, Mulligans was named Best Pub in Manchester at the Manchester Food and Drink Awards.
None of this is accidental. The dispense system, the line cleaning, the pour, the settle, the temperature. Brady treats the Guinness the way a cellar master treats wine: as something that can be ruined by laziness and perfected by care. When the Split the G trend on TikTok sent Guinness volumes through the roof and other pubs ran dry, Mulligans kept 100% supply. The old Guinness fonts on the bar are late 80s originals, what Brady calls hen's teeth. The result is a pint that tastes the way it tastes in Dublin. Flat black, white crown, no theatre. You could close your eyes and be on the Emerald Isle. That is not something you can say about many pubs in England, and it is the reason people cross the city for it.
The Music
Mulligans has live music seven nights a week. Not a Spotify playlist through a speaker in the corner. Not a DJ set in a booth nobody asked for. Live musicians, on a stage, playing to the room. The music bill runs to not far off £10,000 a week. Brady works with around 50 acts through GigPig, booking seasoned musicians who can read the room and adjust a set mid-show. Irish trad is dominant, but the range is wider than that. The quality is consistent because the booking is serious and the expectation is that the music matters as much as the drink.
The downstairs bar is where the music works best. Low ceilings, exposed brick, wood panelling, and a room that was built for sound to bounce around in. An acoustic set in Mulligans on a Tuesday night is worth more than a ticketed gig in most venues on a Saturday. The staff know it. They move around the music, not through it. The atmosphere is not manufactured. It is the natural result of putting good musicians in a good room and letting the Guinness do the rest.
An acoustic set in Mulligans on a Tuesday night is worth more than a ticketed gig in most venues on a Saturday.
The Room
When it is baking outside, and Manchester does get properly hot for about nine days a year, Mulligans is the place to be. Step off Southgate and through the door and the temperature drops. The low ceilings, the thick walls, the stone and brick and wood of a building that has been here for over a century and a half, all of it keeps the heat out. It is the coolest room in the city in both senses of the word.
In 2024, the pub doubled in size, expanding into the first floor with a mezzanine bar that has high ceilings, beautiful beams, and 24 Guinness taps across the building to keep up with demand. But the heart of Mulligans is still downstairs. The snug, the low light, the pint settling on the bar, the musician tuning up in the corner. It is not a heritage pub in the way that the Pev or the BP are heritage pubs. There are no CAMRA stars, no listed building status, no murals of historical events. What Mulligans has is something harder to bottle: a room that feels right, staff who are brilliant at what they do, and a pint of Guinness that could hold its own in any bar on the Liffey. That is its own kind of legend.