Next Zoom tour, Thursday 1 July 2021, 8.30pm.
Meet: on your computer!
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

This is the official Zoom tour to promote the new RHS Gardens at Worsley and the Bridgewater Canal.

***

Worsley is one of the wonders of the North-West and one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution. It was here in 1761 that the local landowner, the Duke of Bridgewater, and his ingenious engineers, John Gilbert and James Brindley, cut Britain’s first man-made canal independent of the river system – the Bridgewater Canal– to ferry the Duke’s coal to Manchester.

And now it’s all been joined by the very latest Royal Horticultural Society gardens, 156 acres, lovingly created out of the grounds of Worsley New Hall in a multi-million pound development to bring about a greener and environmentally sound future.

On this Zoom tour, also lovingly created, by the North-West’s most prolific tour guide, Ed Glinert, we visit the village’s key sites:

* The deep and dangerous Delph that provided coal for the great cities from 42 miles of tunnels.

* The 1760 Packet House, redesigned in the Victorian era into an elaborate black-and-white structure, outside which the world’s first steamboat was built in 1780 – some thirty years before the better-known New Orleans vessels that cross the Mississippi first appeared.

* St Mark’s Church, designed by the grand Gothicist George Gilbert Scott, where the one o’clock bell chimes thirteen times.

* The village green, for a century a smithy of industry, but landscaped and prettified a hundred years ago.

Then it’s off to the new RHS gardens, to whet your appetite for your visit, or to clarify what you’ve just seen.

Finally we will take a jaunt along the Bridgewater Canal, Britain’s first, where James Brindley built what the Duke of Bridgewater called a “castle in the air”.