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The Haçienda was a nightclub located at 11-13 Whitworth Street West in a former yacht-builder’s showroom. Its moving spirit was the local media figure and record label chief Tony Wilson, the head of Manchester’s Factory Records; the club received its own Factory Records catalogue number, FAC 51. (The cedilla was added to the letter C in its name, despite its not being used in Spanish, in order to create a spelling that looked like its FAC number.) It was largely financed by the profits Factory Records made from the band New Order, and the band’s members like Wilson were directors of the club. The name Haçienda was taken from a Situationist manifesto by Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism: "The Hacienda Must Be Built".
The club opened in 1982 with a performance by Bernard Manning. During its early years it hosted various notable post-punk acts – The Smiths played there several times – but it gained its real fame during the years of acid house, beginning to host club nights of this nature in 1986. The drug-centred nature of this subculture brought its own problems, with the UK’s first ecstasy-related death in 1989 and then an upsurge in violence that led to its brief closure in 1991.
Like most elements of Factory Records, the Haçienda had chaotic finances – Tony Wilson was much more interested in cultural production and provocation than in business – and this was the main driver of its closure in 1997. (Again, the nature of the acid house subculture may also have been partly to blame: club-goers taking ecstasy did not spend enough at the venue’s bars for it to make real money on alcohol sales, the lifeblood of most clubs.)
Following the club’s closure the building was demolished and the site used for flats.

Created: Tue, 19 Dec 2017, Updated: Tue, 19 Dec 2017