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Manchester businesses worth ringing first, from damp specialists to wedding caterers

The black mould is back on the bathroom ceiling, the NHS wait for an ADHD assessment shows no sign of ending, or the wedding is in August and there is still no caterer. For moments like these, Manchester Picks keeps a short list of businesses in Manchester, Salford and Trafford that do that exact job as their trade and whose customers have been happy with them for a good while.

Old terraces, short tenancies and the tram

A lot of Manchester lives in Victorian terraces with solid brick walls, tired slate roofs and back bedrooms that never quite warm up, which keeps damp specialists, roofers and boiler engineers busy all winter. In Fallowfield and Withington, student lets change hands every summer and end-of-tenancy cleaners book up fast. Each entry gives the business’s address, so you can tell whether it is a short hop on the Metrolink or a crawl through city centre traffic with nowhere to park.

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How a business earns its place

Three questions settle each list. Is the job on the list this business’s main work, or something it takes on now and then? What have its customers said in public over the years, not just last month? Does its own website explain clearly what it does, where it works and how it charges? The order is our editorial judgement. Nobody pays to get in, Pro and Top can only be bought once a business has been chosen, and both are always labelled.

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