Unicorn Grocery

A grocery owned entirely by the people who stack its shelves: Unicorn registered as a workers' co-operative in 1995, opened on Albany Road on 21 September 1996 with a handful of members, and has grown to around seventy-six worker-owners turning over eight million pounds a year — every one of them with an equal say and no boss anywhere in the building. The shop is a Chorlton institution of organic veg, wholefoods and proper bread, and has twice taken the best food retailer title at the BBC Food and Farming Awards. The weekly Veg News still goes up on the site, thirty years in — the co-op equivalent of a pulse, strong and regular.