It was a distinctive blend of radical politics and coverage of the increasingly exciting Manchester youth culture scene of the early 1980s, coinciding with the rise of Factory Records and The Haçienda.
The magazine was started by a small group of former Manchester University students, Ed Glinert, Chris Paul and Andy Spinoza, on a shoestring budget in a run-down building in Portland Street in the city centre.
Similarly, its arts writing can be seen as a vibrant record of a ground-level cultural renaissance taking place with the opening of new facilities as the Hacienda (1982), the Green Room performance venue (1984) and the Cornerhouse visual arts centre (1985); this upsurge was typified by the imaginative re-using of old and vacant city centre buildings for arts and leisure, and can be seen as a key building block of what was later hailed as the physical regeneration of Manchester city centre through widespread commercial investment and property development.
City Life's publisher, Diverse Media, was acquired by the fellow GMG media outlet, Manchester Evening News,[1] and City Life now lives on as a 20-page supplement every Friday within the Manchester Evening News, and continues to be the most-read Whats On guide on the North of England (333k readers.
Its website http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/ regularly generates over a million page views every month from more than 250k unique users (Source: Omniture September 2014) CityLife's sister title CityLife Extra is a Free solus publication delivered every Thursday to 16k City Centre apartments and a further 6k copies handed out with the Manchester Evening News.