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 tree by artist Kerry Morrison in 1992, 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 has a monument to Vimto.  This is not as strange as it sounds.

Vimto was invented here in 1908. It was sold to temperance bars and small cafes across the North West as a health tonic. It was registered as a medicine. It was marketed to people who wanted the occasion of a drink without the alcohol. It is now, according to a Sunday Times article from 2007, the most popular drink in some Arab countries during the holy month of Ramadan — consumed by millions of Muslims at the moment of breaking the daily fast. A purple cordial invented in Manchester to compete with beer became a fixture of one of the world's great religious observances. The story of how that happened is worth telling.

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 ingredients of the Victorian health trade. He was not, primarily, a drinks manufacturer. He was a wholesale supplier to the kind of shops and establishments that sold remedies, tonics and preparations promising vim, vigour and general good health to a working population that had reason to want all three.

What Nichols saw in 1908 was an opportunity created by two converging forces. The first was the temperance movement — a significant moral and social campaign that had been gathering force 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 1908 Licensing Act, which imposed new restrictions on the sale of alcohol and strengthened the hand of the growing temperance movement considerably. Together, they had created a market: people who wanted to go to a bar and not drink beer, establishments that wanted something interesting to serve them, and a supply chain primed for a non-alcoholic drink with genuine flavour and 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 secret blend of herbs and spices whose precise composition has never been publicly disclosed. He marketed it as a health drink, registered it as a medicine, and began distributing it to temperance bars, small cafes and outlets across the North West. It sold. It sold well enough that within two years his premises on Granby Row had become 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 that connected Manchester to Salford. Horse-drawn carts moved cordial concentrate out of the building and into the surrounding streets. The workers of Salford became the first production team for what was not yet called Vimto.

The name shortened in 1912. 'Vim Tonic' became 'Vimto' — a compressed version that was faster to say, easier to brand and harder to confuse with the numerous other tonic drinks competing for the same temperance-era market. The same year, the trademark was registered. In 1913, Vimto was re-registered — not as a medicine but as a cordial. The legal category had changed. The drink had not.

From Salford, production followed Manchester's industrial geography westward: Old Trafford in 1927, Wythenshawe in the south of the city by 1971. Each move reflected a business that had outgrown its previous home. Nichols became a limited company in 1929. The brand added new expressions — a carbonated version decades after the original, then sugar-free variants, then flavour extensions. But the core product, the purple cordial of grapes and raspberries and blackcurrants and a recipe that still has not been published, remained the same.

The Wythenshawe factory was more than an industrial site. It was a local institution — close enough to the surrounding schools that primary school children were brought on trips to see how it was made. For a generation of south Manchester children, Vimto was not just a drink they recognised from the supermarket or the corner shop. It was a place they had visited, a smell they could recall, a local fact that meant something specific to where they grew up. Nichols moved out of manufacturing in 2003 and closed the Wythenshawe site. The production moved to Leicestershire and Lancashire, contracted to Refresco. The factory visits went with it.

The Journey to India, and Then to the Gulf

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

The Middle East came later, but with greater consequence. Vimto has been produced under licence in Saudi Arabia since 1979 — initially by Aujan & Brothers — and the brand has been present in the Gulf states for over eighty years. What happened in those decades was an alignment that nobody in Manchester could have planned. Vimto's flavour — sweet, fruity, not carbonated in its cordial form, neither coffee nor juice nor water — proved ideally suited to the moment of iftar, the breaking of the daily fast during Ramadan. Muslims breaking their fast at sunset needed something immediate, flavourful and hydrating. Vimto answered all three requirements.

By 2007 the Sunday Times was reporting Vimto as the most popular drink in some Arab countries during Ramadan. It is now produced under licence in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, The Gambia, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Cyprus and Malaysia. It is available in sixty-five countries. A health tonic invented in Manchester to give the temperance movement a credible alternative to beer is the drink with which millions of Muslims end their daily fast during the holiest month of the year. The irony is real, and it is not lost on the people who make it.

Purple Ronnie and the 90s Reinvention

By the 1990s, Vimto had a recognition problem. It was well known in the North West. It was growing internationally. But in terms of cultural positioning in the UK, it sat somewhere between a health drink and a children's cordial — neither quite one thing nor another. The decade was not kind to brands without a clear identity.

Vimto's response was to hire Purple Ronnie. Created by writer and illustrator Giles Andreae, Purple Ronnie was a stick-figure cartoon poet with a slightly rude disposition, a fondness for innuendo, and a gift for short rhymes about everyday subjects that were considerably funnier than they had any right to be. He became a bestselling greetings card character, a cultural reference point of the 90s, and — for seven years — the face of Vimto advertising. The pairing made a particular kind of sense. The 90s were the era of Britpop, of Oasis and Blur and Pulp, of TFI Friday and a general cultural preference for irreverence over polish. Purple Ronnie was irreverent. Vimto, with a cartoon poet making jokes about fizzy bubbles, was suddenly irreverent too.

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

The Monument and the City

In 1992, to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Vimto's creation, Nichols commissioned a public sculpture for Granby Row. The artist Kerry Morrison carved it from a single oak tree from a sustainable forest — a 3.5-metre bottle of Vimto surrounded by the oversized fruits of the recipe: grapes, raspberries, blackcurrants. It was installed on the site of the original Granby Row premises, which had by then been absorbed into the University of Manchester's campus. The small park around it is now 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 more accurately reflect the ingredient. The blackcurrants were replaced. A new wooden barrel was constructed. The monument was returned to Granby Row, where it remains: a cheerfully oversized object in a city that has produced enough to be particular about what it chooses to commemorate.

A second acknowledgement sits on Chapel Street in Salford, where the first Vimto factory stood from 1910 to 1927. The factory was demolished. In 2013, eighty-three apartments and fourteen townhouses were built on the site and named Vimto Gardens. A reference to the Salford Vimto factory also appears in a sculpture at Bexley Square near Salford Town Hall, which 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 mention on a list.

Vimto Beyond the Bottle

The Vimto flavour has extended well beyond the original drink. The combination of grape, raspberry and blackcurrant with herbs and spices has proved transferable: Vimto sweets have been produced under licence for decades, with the flavour appearing across formats that have nothing to do with cordial or carbonated drinks. Jelly Babies, candy floss, roller lickers, candy sprays, flavoured tubes — the purple flavour that John Noel Nichols developed as a health tonic in 1908 now appears in confectionery formats that would have been entirely unrecognisable to him. For the original hot-Vimto-after-school memory that the confectionery range traces back to, see the retro British school sweets guide.

The Vimto confectionery range at Sweet and Glory includes Vimto Jelly Babies 150g, Vimto Candy Floss 30g, Vimto Roller Licker 60ml, Vimto Seriously Big Spray 60ml and Millions Tubes Vimto 55g — the full licensed Vimto sweet range, stocked and dispatched from Trafford Park in Manchester, a mile from where Vimto was being made in the 1920s and 1930s. For the wider world confectionery range, 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.