Vimto: The Manchester Original

On Granby Row in central Manchester, on the grounds of what is now the University of Manchester, there is a 3.5-metre wooden sculpture of a Vimto bottle. Carved from a single oak by the artist Kerry Morrison, it stands surrounded by oversized fruits and herbs — grapes, raspberries, blackcurrants — and marks the spot where one of the most unexpectedly global drinks in the world was first made. Manchester has statues to Emmeline Pankhurst, to Alan Turing, to the worker bee. It also has a monument to a cordial.

This is less strange than it sounds. Vimto was invented here in 1908 and sold to temperance bars and small cafes across the North West as a health tonic. It was registered as a medicine. It was marketed at people who wanted the occasion of a drink without the alcohol. It is now the drink with which millions of Muslims across the Gulf break their fast at sunset during Ramadan. A purple cordial invented in Manchester to compete with beer became a fixture of one of the world's great religious observances, and the route it took to get there is the whole story.

The Man and the Moment

John Noel Nichols was born in Blackburn in 1883. By 1908 he was running a wholesale business at 19 Granby Row in Manchester city centre — herbs, spices, medicines, the raw materials of the Victorian health trade. He was not a drinks manufacturer. He supplied the shops and establishments that sold remedies and preparations promising vim, vigour and general good health to a working population with every reason to want all three.

What Nichols saw was an opening created by two forces meeting. The first was the temperance movement, a serious moral and social campaign that had been building across Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, arguing that alcohol was destroying working-class communities and that a credible alternative was needed. The second was the Licensing Act of 1908, which tightened restrictions on the sale of alcohol and strengthened temperance's hand considerably. Between them they created a market: people who wanted to go to a bar and not drink beer, establishments that needed something worth serving them, and a supply chain ready for a non-alcoholic drink with real flavour and real occasion.

Nichols invented one. He called it Vim Tonic — vim being Victorian slang for energy and enthusiasm, a tonic being what every health product of the era claimed to be. The formula combined the juices of grapes, raspberries and blackcurrants with a blend of herbs and spices whose exact composition has never been published. He registered it as a medicine and began distributing across the North West. It sold well enough that within two years the Granby Row premises were too small.

Vim Tonic Becomes Vimto

In 1910, Nichols moved production across the River Irwell to a warehouse at 203A Chapel Street in Salford, a brick industrial building on a corridor of warehouses and small factories running between the two cities. Horse-drawn carts moved cordial concentrate out into the surrounding streets, and the workers of Salford became the first production team for a drink that was not yet called Vimto.

The name shortened in 1912. Vim Tonic became Vimto — faster to say, easier to brand, harder to confuse with the many other tonics chasing the same temperance market. The trademark was registered the same year. In 1913 it was re-registered not as a medicine but as a cordial. The legal category changed. The drink did not.

From Salford, production followed Manchester's industrial geography westward: Old Trafford in 1927, Wythenshawe by 1971. Nichols became a limited company in 1929. The range added a carbonated version, then sugar-free variants, then flavour extensions. The core product — purple, fruit-led, built on a recipe that still has not been published — stayed as it was.

The Wythenshawe factory was more than an industrial site. It was close enough to the surrounding schools that primary children were taken round on trips to watch the stuff being made. For a generation of south Manchester children, Vimto was not something recognised from a supermarket shelf. It was a place they had been, a smell they could still describe, a local fact that meant something particular about where they grew up. Nichols left manufacturing in 2003 and the site closed. Production moved to Leicestershire and Lancashire under contract. The factory visits went with it.

How a Temperance Tonic Reached the Gulf

In the 1920s a friend of Nichols named Richard Goodsir travelled to India with bottles of concentrate for a local bottling firm to sample. British troops stationed there, many from North West regiments, recognised the taste immediately — it was the flavour of home. The local population tried it. Vimto became genuinely popular in India, and the country was the first international market to take concentrate for local production.

What happened next was accidental in the way that most durable things are. An Indian employee of a Saudi trading family, Abdulla Aujan and Brothers, knew the drink from India and introduced it to his employers. They saw the potential straight away, and in 1927 negotiated the exclusive rights to import and distribute it across the Gulf. Crates went out from Salford, were offloaded in Bahrain, and moved inland from there. The same Chapel Street warehouse that supplied Manchester's temperance bars was supplying the Arabian Peninsula.

The reason it stuck is the part most accounts miss, and it runs directly back to Granby Row. Vimto had been built from the beginning to be conspicuously non-alcoholic — that was the entire commercial proposition in 1908. That made it immediately suitable in a market where alcohol was not an option, at a time when the Gulf had very few interesting non-alcoholic drinks to choose from. On top of that, it was sweet, concentrated and sold as a cordial rather than ready-mixed. After a day without food or water, a heavily sweetened drink delivers energy fast, and mixing it from concentrate turns the serving into a small domestic ritual that families do their own way and pass down. Sweetness, availability and ceremony landed together.

The scale is easy to underestimate. Vimto Arabia's own published figures for 2011 record more than 31 million bottles of concentrate sold across the Gulf, with over half of that going in the run-up to Ramadan or during the month itself. The Gulf formula is more concentrated and sweeter than the British one. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE are the largest consumers of Vimto anywhere outside the United Kingdom. Local licensed manufacturing followed in 1979, and today Vimto is produced under licence in countries including Saudi Arabia, Yemen, The Gambia, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Cyprus and Malaysia.

Purple Ronnie and the Nineties Reinvention

By the 1990s Vimto had a positioning problem at home. It was well known in the North West and growing abroad, but in British cultural terms it sat somewhere between a health drink and a children's cordial, not quite either. That decade was not kind to brands without a clear identity.

The answer was Purple Ronnie. Created by the writer and illustrator Giles Andreae, Purple Ronnie was a stick-figure cartoon poet with a mildly rude disposition, a fondness for innuendo and a gift for short rhymes about ordinary subjects that were far funnier than they needed to be. He was a bestselling greetings card character, a reference point of the decade, and for seven years the face of Vimto advertising. The pairing made a particular kind of sense: this was the era of Britpop and TFI Friday, of a general cultural preference for irreverence over polish, and a cartoon poet making jokes about fizzy bubbles put Vimto on the right side of it.

When that run ended in 2003, Vimto replaced him with a slogan in the same spirit: Shlurpling the Purple. It is not a phrase that would have appeared on a bottle of Vim Tonic. John Noel Nichols, who died in 1966, had sold his drink as a health tonic for people who wanted vigour without the inconvenience of alcohol. Ninety-five years later it was being sold with a cartoon poet's innuendo and an invented verb. The temperance movement would have had thoughts.

The Monument and the City

In 1992, marking the eighty-fifth anniversary, Nichols commissioned a public sculpture for Granby Row. Kerry Morrison carved it from a single oak from a sustainable forest: a 3.5-metre bottle surrounded by the oversized fruits of the recipe. It went up on the site of the original premises, by then absorbed into the university campus. The small park around it is called Vimto Park.

The sculpture weathered nineteen years of Manchester weather, which is a meaningful test, before being restored and repainted in 2011. The grapes were changed from red to green to reflect the actual ingredient more honestly. The blackcurrants were replaced and a new barrel built. It went back to Granby Row, where it remains — a cheerfully oversized object in a city that has produced enough to be particular about what it commemorates.

Salford gets a smaller acknowledgement. The Chapel Street factory stood from 1910 to 1927 and was later demolished; in 2013 a development of eighty-three apartments and fourteen townhouses on the site was named Vimto Gardens. A sculpture at Bexley Square near Salford Town Hall lists Salford Firsts — the first public library, the first public park, the first horse-drawn bus service, and the first Vimto factory. Manchester gets the monument. Salford gets a line on a list.

Vimto Beyond the Bottle

The flavour has travelled a long way past the original drink. Grape, raspberry and blackcurrant with herbs and spices turns out to be highly transferable, and Vimto sweets have been made under licence for decades across formats that have nothing to do with cordial: jellies, candy floss, sprays, roller lickers, flavoured tubes. The purple flavour John Noel Nichols developed as a health tonic now appears in confectionery he would not have recognised as food. For the hot-Vimto-after-school memory that a lot of that range is really trading on, see the retro British school sweets guide.

It is also a useful counterweight to how the drinks business usually works. Vimto built a following across three continents on flavour, availability and word of mouth, without a celebrity budget — which is the opposite of the approach taken in the Cola Wars, where Pepsi and Coca-Cola spent enormous sums buying pop stars to do the same job.

Vimto Confectionery Wholesale at Sweet and Glory

The Vimto confectionery range at Sweet and Glory covers the licensed sweet formats — jellies, candy sprays, roller lickers and flavoured tubes — stocked and dispatched from Trafford Park in Manchester, a mile from where Vimto was being made through the 1920s and 1930s. Check the brand page for the current range. For the wider world confectionery selection, see the candy range.

No minimum order. Free first parcel on orders over £150 ex VAT (additional boxes £7.10 each). Free pallet delivery over £650 ex VAT. Dispatched from Manchester. Create a free account to browse and order.
 

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do people drink Vimto during Ramadan? Three things landed together. Vimto was built from the start to be conspicuously non-alcoholic, which is what made it acceptable in the Gulf when Aujan and Brothers began importing it in 1927, at a point when there were very few interesting non-alcoholic drinks available. It is also heavily sweetened, and after a day without food or water a fast source of sugar is exactly what the body wants at iftar. And it is sold as a concentrate rather than ready-mixed, so making it becomes a small domestic ritual that every family does slightly differently and passes down. Over half of Vimto's Gulf sales fall in Ramadan or the run-up to it.

Where does the name Vimto come from? It was originally Vim Tonic. Vim was Victorian slang for energy and enthusiasm, and tonic was what every health product of the era called itself. The name was shortened to Vimto in 1912, mainly because it was faster to say and harder to confuse with the many rival tonics chasing the same temperance-era market.

Where was Vimto invented? At 19 Granby Row in central Manchester, in 1908, by a wholesale herb and spice merchant called John Noel Nichols. The site is now part of the University of Manchester campus, and a 3.5-metre carved oak Vimto bottle stands on it. The surrounding park is named Vimto Park.

What is actually in Vimto? The juices of grapes, raspberries and blackcurrants, plus a blend of herbs and spices that has never been publicly disclosed in over a century. The Gulf version is more concentrated and sweeter than the British one, which is why people who grew up with it often find the UK bottle disappointing.

Is Vimto still made in Manchester? No. Nichols moved out of manufacturing in 2003 and closed the Wythenshawe factory, and production was contracted out to sites in Leicestershire and Lancashire. The company itself is still headquartered in the North West, but the drink has not been made in Manchester for over twenty years.

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