The Edinburgh Castle, Ancoats: Marketing Review

Last Updated on June 22, 2026

By Whito. Published June 2026.

Most pubs don’t have a marketing problem. They have an infrastructure problem. The food is excellent, the reviews are glowing, the Instagram is full of beautiful plates, and the website looks like it was last touched in 2020. Everything that makes the place worth visiting is trapped inside platforms the pub doesn’t own.

The Edinburgh Castle in Ancoats, Manchester, is a textbook example. This is a pub that has earned a place in the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs (number 16, two years running), has 21,000 Instagram followers, and sits in one of Manchester’s most talked-about neighbourhoods. By any measure, the product is excellent. But the digital foundation underneath it all is years behind where it should be.

This is a full marketing review. What’s working, what’s quietly costing them, and the specific changes that would make the biggest difference.

What The Edinburgh Castle is

An independent pub on Blossom Street in Ancoats, Manchester, standing on the same site since 1811. It was lovingly restored and now operates as a dual-concept venue. Downstairs is a traditional pub with wine, cocktails, ales, and whiskies, walk-in only. Upstairs is Bangkok Diners Club, a new-wave Thai restaurant concept that requires booking.

The pub sits in Cutting Room Square with outdoor seating, in the heart of what was Britain’s first industrial suburb. It has over 215 Google reviews with a 98% recommendation rate. Press coverage includes Manchester Confidentials, The Manc, Creative Tourist, and Taste of Manchester. It’s listed on TripAdvisor, DesignMyNight, and SquareMeal.

The positioning is clear: a proper pub with history, character, and award-winning food. No chains, no corporate feel. The kind of place people recommend to friends.

The marketing scorecard

We reviewed The Edinburgh Castle across eight areas that matter most for an independent pub with a food operation.

What they’re getting right

Instagram is genuinely outstanding

21,000 followers for an independent pub is exceptional. Most pubs in Manchester, even popular ones, sit somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000. The Edinburgh Castle has built an audience that most hospitality businesses would spend years and serious ad budget trying to reach.

The feed works because it shows what the place actually feels like. Food shots, the bar, the building, the square outside. It’s consistent, well-photographed, and updated regularly. Instagram is doing the heavy lifting for this business, and it’s doing it well.

The issue isn’t what’s on Instagram. It’s that almost nothing exists outside of it.

The dual-concept model is smart brand architecture

Running a traditional pub downstairs and a Thai restaurant concept upstairs gives The Edinburgh Castle two audiences, two reasons to visit, and two price points. The pub side captures walk-ins and casual drinkers. Bangkok Diners Club captures the food-focused booking crowd.

This is the kind of setup that larger hospitality groups spend months designing. The Edinburgh Castle appears to have arrived at it organically, which makes it more authentic and harder to copy. It also means two streams of revenue from the same premises, which is commercially sensible.

Award recognition carries real weight

Being listed in the Estrella Damm Top 50 Gastropubs at number 16, for the second consecutive year, is not a vanity metric. That list is followed by food journalists, travel writers, and the kind of customers who plan trips around restaurants. It provides third-party credibility that no amount of self-promotion can replicate.

The problem is how little this achievement is leveraged online. It should be on the homepage, in the meta description, on Google Business Profile, and in every piece of content they produce. Currently, it’s mentioned but not made to work hard enough.

Google reviews are strong and consistent

Over 215 reviews with a 98% recommendation rate is a solid foundation. For a local pub, that volume of positive sentiment means Google is likely surfacing The Edinburgh Castle in local search results already. The reviews are doing work even if no one at the pub is actively managing them.

Combined with listings on TripAdvisor, DesignMyNight, SquareMeal, and Creative Tourist, the third-party presence is well-established. People searching for “best pubs in Ancoats” or “restaurants near Cutting Room Square” are finding this place through directories and reviews, even if the website itself contributes almost nothing.

What needs fixing

1. The website is a single page with no SEO value

This is the most significant problem. The entire Edinburgh Castle website is one static page running on WordPress 5.4.19 (current WordPress is version 6.x going on 7.x). There are no separate pages for the pub, the restaurant, the menu, events, private hire, or anything else. No meta descriptions. No structured content. Google has almost nothing to index.

A pub with this level of recognition should have dedicated pages for the pub, Bangkok Diners Club, the menu (in HTML, not PDF), private hire and group bookings, location and contact details, and press coverage. Each of those pages is a separate opportunity to rank in search results. Right now, the entire business is represented by a single URL.

The WordPress installation also needs updating urgently. Running a version that’s several major releases behind creates security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues. If rebuilding the site, it’s worth considering whether WordPress is still the right platform, or whether a modern website builder would serve better.

2. The menu is PDF-only

PDF menus are invisible to search engines. Someone searching “Thai restaurant menu Ancoats” will never land on The Edinburgh Castle’s menu because Google can’t reliably read or rank PDF content the way it can HTML text.

PDF menus are also frustrating on mobile. They require downloading, zooming, and scrolling sideways. For a pub where the majority of website visitors are likely on their phones, deciding where to eat tonight, that friction costs bookings.

The fix is straightforward: publish the menu as a proper webpage with structured text. Keep the PDF as a download option if you like, but the primary version should be HTML. Include dish names, descriptions, and prices. This also makes updating the menu far easier when dishes change seasonally.

3. No email capture or direct contact channel

The Edinburgh Castle has no newsletter signup, no email list, and no way to contact customers directly. That means every time they want to announce a seasonal menu, a special event, or a private hire offer, they’re entirely dependent on Instagram’s algorithm deciding to show the post.

An email list is the only marketing channel a business truly owns. Instagram can change its algorithm tomorrow. Email lands in the inbox regardless. For a pub with strong footfall and 21,000 social followers, building an email list should be a priority. A simple signup on the booking confirmation page, or a QR code on table cards, would start building that list immediately.

Our guide to the best email marketing platforms for UK small businesses covers the options that work well for hospitality.

4. No events page, no private hire information

A historic pub in a popular square in Ancoats, with a separate upstairs dining room, is an obvious venue for private hire, corporate events, and special occasions. But there’s no information about this on the website. Parties of five or more are told to email, with no details about what’s possible, what it costs, or what the space looks like.

Every week that passes without a private hire page is a week where potential bookings are going to competitors who make it easy to enquire. A dedicated page with photos of the space, capacity, sample menus, and a contact form would convert interest into bookings without any additional effort from staff.

5. Two separate websites fragment SEO authority

Bangkok Diners Club has its own website at bangkokdinersclub.com. That means Google treats it as an entirely separate business. Any links, reviews, or mentions that point to the Bangkok Diners Club site do nothing for ec-ancoats.com, and vice versa.

For a venue operating under one roof, this splits the SEO authority in half. The stronger approach would be to house Bangkok Diners Club as a section within the main Edinburgh Castle website (ec-ancoats.com/bangkok-diners-club). That way, every piece of press coverage, every backlink, and every directory listing strengthens a single domain rather than diluting across two.

The priority list

Tools worth paying for

Everything in the priority list can be done for minimal cost. But if The Edinburgh Castle wants to move from patching gaps to building a proper marketing system, these are the tools worth spending on.

Website rebuild: Squarespace or WordPress with a modern theme (£150 to £300/year)

The current single-page WordPress site on version 5.4 needs replacing, not updating. For a hospitality business that needs a menu page, booking integration, events listing, and private hire section, Squarespace is the fastest route to a professional result without hiring a developer. The Business plan at around £150/year includes everything needed: mobile-responsive templates designed for restaurants, built-in SEO tools, and simple content management for staff who aren’t technical. If staying on WordPress, a modern theme like Flavor or flavor theme with Elementor Pro (around £60/year) would work, but requires more setup time.

Email marketing: MailerLite or Mailchimp (free to £25/month)

With 21,000 Instagram followers and no email list, The Edinburgh Castle is one algorithm change away from losing its primary marketing channel. MailerLite is free up to 1,000 subscribers and handles everything a pub needs: monthly newsletters, seasonal menu announcements, and event invitations. The signup mechanism is simple. A QR code on table cards linking to a signup page (“Get first look at our seasonal menus and events”). With the footfall this pub gets, building a list of 1,000 subscribers within three months is realistic. Mailchimp is the other strong option, particularly if the team wants more template variety.

Booking system upgrade: ResDiary or DesignMyNight (from £80/month)

Bangkok Diners Club already takes bookings, but a dedicated restaurant booking system like ResDiary does more than accept reservations. It manages table allocation, reduces no-shows with automated reminders, captures customer data for the email list, and tracks covers per service. For a venue running two concepts (walk-in pub downstairs, booking-only restaurant upstairs), ResDiary or a similar platform gives the data needed to optimise both. DesignMyNight is another option that also provides discovery and marketing reach, which could be valuable for the events side.

Social media scheduling: Buffer (from £5/month)

Instagram is already excellent. But Facebook is at 2,200 followers, a fraction of the Instagram audience, and X appears dormant. Rather than managing three platforms manually, Buffer lets the team cross-post and schedule content from one place. The £5/month essentials plan covers three channels. Repurposing the best Instagram content to Facebook and X takes minutes, not hours, when it’s scheduled in batch.

SEO and local visibility: SE Ranking (from £30/month)

Once the website has more than one page, tracking how it performs becomes worthwhile. An SEO tool like SE Ranking shows which terms the site is appearing for (“best pub Ancoats,” “Thai restaurant Manchester,” “private dining Manchester”), where it ranks, and what competitors are doing. For a venue relying on search and discovery, knowing which pages are driving traffic, and which aren’t, turns guesswork into decisions.

Professional photography (one-off £200 to £400)

The Instagram photos are strong, but the website and Google Business Profile need high-resolution images of the interior, the bar, the upstairs dining room, the outdoor seating on Cutting Room Square, and the food. A single session with a hospitality photographer produces 30 to 50 images that cover the website rebuild, Google Business Profile, menus, and social media for months. This is a one-off cost that keeps paying returns across every channel.

Total ongoing cost: around £130 to £170/month plus the one-off photography session. For a venue already generating strong revenue, that’s one busy Friday evening covering a full year of marketing tools.

Where The Edinburgh Castle sits in the framework

Whito uses a three-stage framework for small business marketing: Start (getting the basics in place), Build (developing systems and channels), and Scale (growing reach and revenue consistently).

The Edinburgh Castle is a split case. The pub itself, the product, the reputation, the press coverage, the social following, is operating at Scale level. The marketing infrastructure, the website, the email systems, the SEO, the content, is stuck at Start.

That gap is the entire problem. A business this good should not be this hard to find through Google. The Instagram and word-of-mouth are carrying the load right now, but they’re masking a digital foundation that needs serious attention.

The priority is to move the infrastructure from Start to Build. That means a proper website, HTML menus, email capture, and consolidated domains. Once that foundation is in place, the existing strengths (the award, the reviews, the Instagram audience) will work much harder because they’ll have somewhere useful to point to.

The verdict

The Edinburgh Castle is one of the best pubs in Manchester. The food, the setting, the history, the dual-concept model, and the Instagram presence all point to a business that knows what it’s doing. Number 16 in the Top 50 Gastropubs is not an accident.

But the website is letting the side down badly. A single static page on outdated WordPress, a PDF-only menu, no email list, no events page, no private hire information, and two separate domains splitting SEO authority. These are all fixable problems, and none of them are expensive.

The Edinburgh Castle doesn’t need to spend more on marketing. It needs to build the infrastructure that lets everything it already does well actually compound. Fix the website, merge the domains, start collecting emails, and let the product do the rest.

Related reading

• Pub Marketing Guide
• Hospitality Marketing Guide
• Best Email Marketing Platforms for UK Small Businesses
• Best Booking Systems for UK Small Businesses
• Website Builders Compared
• Get a Free Growth Report

Whito

Whito exists to stop businesses scaling the wrong way. We focus on structure, leverage, and measurable growth, not noise, not vanity metrics.

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