The Warehouse Project

The Warehouse Project was born in 2006, the brainchild of Sacha Lord and Sam Kandel, two Manchester promoters who recognised that the city needed a world-class indoor electronic music event to fill the gap left by the closure of legendary clubs like The Hacienda and Sankeys. Their vision was not to open a traditional nightclub that operated year-round, but to create a seasonal event series — a concentrated burst of the finest electronic music programming in the world, compressed into the autumn and winter months when Manchester's music-obsessed population craved somewhere extraordinary to dance.

The first Warehouse Project season took place in the tunnels beneath Store Street, adjacent to Manchester Piccadilly station. The venue was a network of Victorian-era railway arches — low-ceilinged, brick-walled, dripping with atmosphere. The conditions were raw: condensation ran down the walls, the bass reverberated through the tunnels in ways that no purpose-built venue could replicate, and the crowd was pressed together in a space that felt genuinely underground in every sense. Store Street became the spiritual home of WHP, and for many, it remains the definitive Warehouse Project experience. The tunnels gave the event its identity: industrial, intense, unapologetically Mancunian.

Over the following years, WHP grew rapidly. The quality of the lineups escalated season after season, and the event developed a reputation as the place where the biggest names in electronic music wanted to play. The Store Street era established WHP's core programming philosophy: eclectic bookings that ranged from underground techno and house through to bass music, electronica, and live electronic acts, presented in an environment that prioritised the music and the dancefloor above all else. By the early 2010s, The Warehouse Project was widely recognised as the most important club event series in the UK outside of London.

The event briefly moved to other venues over the years, including a spell at Victoria Warehouse in Trafford and events at the Piccadilly Train Station car park, but it always returned to Store Street. In 2019, however, WHP made the biggest move in its history, relocating to Depot Mayfield — a massive former Royal Mail sorting office directly behind Piccadilly station. The move to Depot Mayfield was transformative: the new venue offered vastly more space, multiple rooms, improved facilities, and a capacity of approximately 10,000. It allowed WHP to scale its ambitions without compromising the raw energy that had defined it from the beginning.

The Warehouse Project has always placed enormous emphasis on sound quality. From the very first season in the Store Street tunnels, WHP invested in serious sound infrastructure that set it apart from typical promotional events. The confined spaces of Store Street presented unique acoustic challenges — low ceilings and brick walls created powerful natural reverberations — and WHP's sound engineers learned to work with these characteristics rather than against them, producing a bass-heavy, immersive sound that became part of the venue's identity.

The move to Depot Mayfield in 2019 allowed WHP to significantly upgrade its sound and production capabilities. The main warehouse space at Depot Mayfield features a bespoke sound system designed to fill the cavernous room with crisp, detailed audio at extreme volumes while maintaining clarity across the frequency spectrum. Multiple rooms are equipped with their own dedicated systems, each tuned to the specific acoustic properties of the space. The result is that whether you are in the main room experiencing a headline techno set or in a smaller side room for a more intimate DJ performance, the sound quality is consistently exceptional.

Production design at WHP has become increasingly ambitious with each season. The Depot Mayfield venue allows for large-scale lighting rigs, laser installations, LED walls, projection mapping, CO2 cannons, and pyrotechnics on a scale that rivals major festival main stages. For special events — such as Aphex Twin, The Chemical Brothers, or Bicep — bespoke production designs are created that transform the industrial space into immersive audiovisual environments. WHP's production team works closely with artists and their creative directors to ensure that every show delivers visual impact to match the musical programming.

The multi-room configuration at Depot Mayfield also allows WHP to programme contrasting sonic environments across a single night. The main room might feature high-energy techno with full production, while an adjacent space offers deeper house music in a more stripped-back setting, and a third area might host experimental electronica or bass music. This diversity is central to WHP's appeal and reflects the broad musical tastes of its audience.

Manchester's relationship with electronic music and club culture runs deeper than almost any other city in the world. The story begins with The Haciënda, the legendary nightclub opened by Factory Records and New Order in 1982 on Whitworth Street West. The Haciënda became the crucible of the acid house revolution in the late 1980s, with DJ Mike Pickering's Nude night and Graeme Park's sets introducing ecstasy culture and Chicago house to a generation of young Mancunians. The club's influence was seismic — it helped birth the Madchester movement, shaped the sound of the early 1990s, and turned Manchester into the centre of British youth culture.

When The Haciënda closed in 1997, the baton passed to a new generation of venues. Sankeys, originally known as Sankeys Soap, opened in 1994 in Ancoats and became Manchester's premier underground club through the late 1990s and 2000s. With its raw, stripped-back aesthetic and commitment to quality techno and house programming, Sankeys earned a reputation as one of the UK's finest small clubs and a DJ Mag Top 100 regular. But Sankeys too eventually closed its doors, leaving a void in Manchester's nightlife landscape.

The Warehouse Project emerged at precisely the right moment to fill that void. When Sacha Lord and Sam Kandel launched WHP in 2006, they were inheriting a city with an almost religious devotion to dancefloor culture — a city that had been shaped by The Haciënda and Sankeys, by Factory Records and Madchester, by a deep understanding that the dancefloor is a place of genuine communion and transformation. WHP took that heritage and channelled it into something new: a seasonal event series that combined Manchester's raw, industrial spirit with world-class programming and production.

Sacha Lord's subsequent appointment as Greater Manchester's Night Time Economy Adviser further cemented the connection between WHP and Manchester's cultural identity. Lord has used the position to advocate for the city's nightlife industry at the highest levels of government, arguing that clubs and live music venues are not nuisances to be regulated out of existence but essential cultural institutions that drive economic growth and community cohesion. It is a philosophy rooted in the lessons of The Haciënda and Sankeys — that when a city loses its dancefloors, it loses something irreplaceable.

Today, The Warehouse Project stands as the direct inheritor of Manchester's club heritage. Just as The Haciënda defined the late 1980s and Sankeys defined the 2000s, WHP defines the current era of Manchester dance culture. The connection is not just spiritual but practical: many of the same DJs who cut their teeth at Sankeys or who worshipped at The Haciënda now headline WHP seasons. Manchester's dancefloor tradition is alive and thriving, and The Warehouse Project is its beating heart.