It appears that the craze for Ping Pong craze has hit the area with more and more of the region’s bars and clubs are obliging their sports hungry guests.
Now Manchester Entrepreneur Gary Wilson has opened the Ping Pong Arch in a Salford railway arch just off Trinity Way, in a space rented from Network Rail.
Following in the footsteps of London club Bounce, located on the very site where the game of Ping Pong was invented and patented in 1901 by John Jaques III, the club has six tables which cost £10 an hour to hire.
Once licences are in place it will also serve food and drink, including real ales from the First Chop microbrewery which is based in a neighbouring arch.
Manchester’s first Ping Pong league was formed back in 1927 when a handful of young men, who had , for many years, represented the Junior Section of the Manchester YMCA in the Manchester Lad’s Clubs Federation (Ping-Pong Section) found that they were now too old to be classed as Juniors.
Harry Jones as captain, issued a challenge through the local press, to all clubs interested in the game of Table Tennis. Over the next few months, these YMCA youths played over 30 games, under the psuedonym of “The Mustard Club”, against all sorts of competition ranging from Lad’s Club Federation teams, city café clubs, business house teams to golf clubs and cricket clubs. These games were played in a relatively haphazard way by informal challenges. Sometimes clubs were asked to play two or three times in a week. It was considered disrespectful to ever turn down a challenge.
