Meet: Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 11.30am.

Words, phrases, ideas, claims, injunctions, entreaties, accusations, threats, memories…“Tho’ much is taken, much abides…which in old days Mov’d earth and heaven”.

We honour the greatest writers – Tennyson (that’s him, above), Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Rossetti, John Cooper Clarke – and explain their links with Manchester and the Golden Age of Poetry, which is always now.

We hear how Tennyson is adorned on the upper floors of the Town Hall and how Rossetti released his paintings with accompanying verse. And here is Lord Byron on local industrial unrest in the early 19th century:
“Those villains, the Weavers, are all grown refractory,
Asking some succour for charity’s sake;
So hang them in clusters, round each Manufactory,
That will at once put an end to mistake.*

Men are more easily made than Machinery,
Stockings will fetch higher than lives;
Gibbets on Sherwood will heighten the scenery,
Shewing how Commerce, how Liberty thrives.

Alfred Lord Tennyson looking distinctly like Bob Dylan. We’ll be featuring him as well.