Next FREE walking tour: Saturday 18 March 2023.
Meet: Band on the Wall, Swan Street, 2pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
From San Francisco to Sao Paulo, from St Etienne to St Helens, the masses have been beating a path to soak up the boho, NoHo, So-ho mojo atmosphere of Ancoats
Peterloo is for life, not just 16 August.
Tours all year round.
Please book below with eventbrite.
The Peterloo Massacre: Saturday 18 March 2022.
Meet: Central Library, St Peter’s Square, 11am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
These unique Peterloo tours have been devised by Ed Glinert, Penguin author and compiler of the forthcoming Manchester Encyclopaedia, who has conducted enormous amounts of recent research into the entire Peterloo story (with many thanks to Mike Herbert’s invaluable expertise).
Manchester tour guide Ed Glinert has worked with both the campaigning journalist extraordinaire Paul Foot (author of Red Shelley) and Mike Leigh, director of the Peterloo film.
* Read on:
The Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819 is the most dramatic incident in English political history. Sabre-wielding troops charged 60,000 Mancunians at a rally called to lower the price of bread and demand the vote. More than a dozen people died and some 650 were injured.
The first few decades of the 19th century, enshrined in public imagination as the elegant age of the Regency, were a time of severe political repression in England. The Tory government, led by Lord Liverpool, feared that the kind of revolutionary activity recently witnessed in France would break out in England – probably in Manchester, where social conditions were so desperate – and chose decided to stamp out all dissent and free speech.
The government was at war with France, which saw Wellington triumph over Napoleon’s forces at Waterloo in 1815.
But as Paul Foot once wrote, the British government was also waging war against its own people.
This guided tour, visiting the site of St Peter’s Field in Manchester city centre where the Peterloo Massacre took place, has been devised by Ed Glinert, political commentator with 40 years’ experience for various leading newspapers, magazines and publishers, who worked with legendary left-wing political journalist Paul Foot at Private Eye combating injustice.
Glinert, who has researched the story for decades, brings his unique touch to this chilling story, going into extraordinary detail, explaining the build-up to the events, the violence of the day, 16 August 1819, and the dreadful aftermath, introducing related events, themes and people: Shelley’s powerful poem, The Masque of Anarchy; the birth of the Manchester Guardian; the Cato Street Conspiracy; the Six Acts; Tom Paine and his bones – even Anthony Burgess.
Next walking tour: Friday 17 March 2023, 5.30pm.
Meet: Victoria Station Wallmap.
Booking: Please press here to register with Eventbrite.
Enter, if you dare, a nether world of murder, assassination, hanging, homicide, regicide, talking corpses and some really nasty stuff.
Tragic deaths and accidental deaths. Hoax deaths and bloody deaths. Death by hanging, death by shooting and sudden death. Those who didn’t die and those who should have died. Instant death. Slow, tortuous death. There are lot of unexplained deaths on this tour, as well as the odd decapitation, hanging and being buried alive.
It’s a grave night out!
These are gruesome, ghastly and ghostly stories, especially when they involve those who weren’t supposed to be dead. Take the case of Manchester man John Beswick. He woke up some time in 1750 to find himself in a confined space, and then realised it was his own coffin. He banged on the roof and was rather relieved to find a crowd of people on the other side ready to release him. They were the mourners at his funeral. He wasn’t dead, just very tired.
His sister, Hannah, was so mortified of being similarly buried alive she asked a local doctor, Charles White, to check her corpse regularly once she had expired. In return she made a hefty donation to Dr White’s new infirmary, what is now the MRI in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Once looked as if Hannah had expired the doctor made sure by pickling her in vinegar and stuffing the body into a grandfather clock in her own house in east Manchester where the servants could check on her every day. Hannah Beswick remains dead.
This is just one of many deathly stories we’ve dug up and revived for this chilling tour with the equally frightening Ed Glinert.
Next tour, the Little Ireland Explorer:
Friday 17 March during the 2023 Manchester Irish Festival.
Meet: Outside HOME, 11.30am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Brendan Behan: genius writer or terrorist?
Larkin, Allen and O’Brien: murderers or martyrs?
No wonder Karl Marx urged Britain to solve the Irish question before choosing socialism.
But don’t worry, we won’t get too political. We need some room left for a whiff of the Waxie’s Dargle.
An NMW walk in association with the Irish Festival.
Next FREE tour: Thursday 16 March, 2pm.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
This is a new tour to take you into the heart of Manchester Cathedral to see the paintings and icons; to St Ann’s Church to examine the “Deposition From the Cross” painting and the stained glass windows; to the Hidden Gem for the Stations of the Cross; and to the John Rylands Library for the returned St John Fragment, the oldest surviving example of the New Testament.
Locations visited
* Manchester Cathedral
* St Ann’s Church
* The Hidden Gem church
* John Rylands Library
The Glories of Manchester Architecture, Monday 13 March 2023.
Meet: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street, 11 a.m.
Booking: Please press here to register with Eventbrite.
Price: FREE (tip the guide if he or she deserves it!).
Merchants’ palaces, Gothic towers, Baroque fantasies and Classical temples: Manchester city centre is lined with architectural splendour, from the soaring spires of Manchester Town Hall to the mathematical purity of the Friends’ Meeting House; from the exquisite Renaissance effects of the Athenaeum to the Art Deco embellishments of Sunlight House.
No wonder the Builder magazine once described Manchester as “a more interesting city to walk over than London. One can scarcely walk about Manchester without coming across frequent examples of the grand in architecture. There is nothing to equal it since the building of Venice”.
On our Manchester Architecture tours we take you through the city’s streets looking at its most impressive buildings, era by era, style by style, architect by architect, showing off Manchester’s first designer buildings from the early 19th century right through the ages to today’s stunning skyscrapers.
Want to read more?
Here’s the piece Ed Glinert wrote for the Manchester International Festival 2011 brochure. It’s one of the best articles there’s ever been about Manchester architecture, so why did the people who run the Festival refuse to use it again?
The best view of Manchester’s architecture is from Salford. Stand on isolated, lonely Oldfield Road, off Salford Crescent, by the dried up route of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, and look west, and there it is: Manchester, caught in a perspective of triumphant towers and soaring skyscrapers. Marvel at the sticking-out “drawers” of the Civil Justice Centre aside its formidable aluminium composite bulk and suspended glass wall, the largest in Europe. Look in awe at the Art Deco fortress of Sunlight House, and take in an intoxicating vision of the Beetham, the subtlety of its shape now suitably sensed when removed by the long gap.
Walk from here into Manchester and the finer detailing of these facades becomes sharper. Central Manchester is dominated by 19th century architects’ desperation to re-create the traditional styles of Europe – Greek, Gothic, Italianate, Baroque – on uncharted territory. Manchester has few original buildings, just brilliant copies. The Memorial Hall on the corner of Albert Square and Southmill Street by Thomas Worthington is pure 15thcentury Venice. What’s left of the Free Trade Hall on nearby Peter Street is Edward Walters’ take on the Gran Guardia Vecchia in Verona. You want more Italy on the streets of Manchester? Head for the Athenaeum on Princess Street, now part of the art gallery, and behold a Florentine Palace that’s pure Palazzo Pandolfini by Raphael, while inside ironically is a large collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings himself.
On the way, you might head past Friends Meeting House on Mount Street. It’s Greek. Ancient Greek. The façade is based on the Temple on the Ilissus because Richard Lane, designing in the 1820s, believed that as Manchester had no cultural legacy the city should pay homage to the territory where modern ideas of aesthetics, art and architecture were shaped. Not that everybody was impressed with the slew of Classical revival buildings he created. The Builder magazine for instance derided his work (Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall, St Thomas’s Pendleton) as looking like a factories with the front of temples stuck on.
At least in modern times Manchester has begun to originate. The Bruntwood-owned Bank Chambers/Bank House on Faulkner Street, between Piccadilly Gardens and Chinatown, is a magnificent segue of big tower and little tower on a concrete podium. It was designed by Fitzroy, Robinson in 1971 and appropriately is home to Fairhurst’s, the most prolific architects in Manchester history. Pity it will need another hundred years before its brutalist beauty and granite-and-glass glamour are fully appreciated.
We can no longer do this in person as it is too dangerous!, so join us on Zoom for even better value
Next Zoom tour: Sunday 12 March 2023.
Meet: On your computer, 7.30pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
This is the de-luxe Underground Manchester tour, taking you from the comfort of your living room into the city’s biggest WW2 air-raid shelter, through the subterranean canal, underneath the Cathedral and at last into the atomic bunker.
It’s the on-line version of what was for years the second most popular walking tour in the country, featured in the Manchester Evening News, Daily Telegraph and on Granada Reports.
So, no longer do you have to don stout boots and descend several hundred feet into an air-less chamber filled with ankle-breaking boulders. It also means we can examine every interesting hidden nook and cranny without breaking sweat. Eureka!
It’s a weird and wild world below. Come with us and find out why!
The Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester
Next tour: Tuesday 25 April 2023, 11.30am.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap.
Ends: At the Jewish museum.
Booking: Please press here to register with Eventbrite.
Manchester’s Jewish community first appeared in numbers in the late 18th century around the parish church (!).
Well, that was the old town, where people lived.
Gradually Manchester Jews began to move north, first to Strangeways (the area, not the prison, you schmerel), then Cheetham Hill, Hightown, Prestwich and eventually Whitefield.
Only London has a bigger Jewish population in Britain than Manchester. But only Manchester has a Torah Street (with its own bacon-curing factory; really!) and a prison built like a mosque in the heart of the ghetto. And that’s apart from a history embracing that rogue Robert Maxwell, the rich-beyond-rich Nathan Meyer Rothschild, and the rabidly irreligious Karl Marx – all Yiddisher fellers, sort of.
Next Free Tour: Saturday 11 March 2023.
Meet: Emmeline Pankhurst statue, St Peter’s Square, 2pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
It is now a hundred and two years (1 December 1919) since a woman entered the British Parliament for the first time. American socialite Nancy Astor won a by-election for the Unionists in Plymouth Sutton, ironically replacing her husband, Waldorf Astor, who had just been ennobled.
The campaign to win women the vote and the right to enter the Commons had been raging ever since more than a dozen people were killed and hundreds injured at the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. Henry Hunt, the main speaker at the Peterloo rally that never happened, later became the first MP to put forward a bill to allow women to vote in general elections, but that was back in the 1830s. Two generations later the Pankhurst family took over the campaign, leading one of the most bitter and brutal political battles in British history, for many years from Manchester.
Partial victory was celebrated in 1918 when (some) women were at last allowed to vote and stand. One woman was elected, but never took her seat. A year later Nancy Astor made up for it.
Hear the full story on this eye-opening guided tour.
!!STOP PRESS!!
This is the only Pankhurst tour which goes to the Pankhursts’ shop (yes, I bet you didn’t know they had a shop in Manchester city centre!) and gives the accurate political background to the infamous Free Trade Hall rally in October 1905.
We have made a forensic and in-depth study of this extraordinary story. Discover Manchester’s cataclysmic connections…
…read on below.
Further study
In August 1819 at least a dozen people were killed demonstrating for the right to vote at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1903, the Pankhurst family, disgusted with the Independent Labour Party’s refusal to allow women to use the newly-opened Pankhurst Hall in north Manchester, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union to step up the campaign for the right of women to have the vote in parliamentary elections.
What had been a sedate pressure group, willing to stay within the law to change the law, soon became militant. The women suffrage supporters (“suffragettes,” the Daily Mail called them) disrupted a Liberal Party rally in the Free Trade Hall in 1905 and two of their leaders – Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney – were jailed. Manchester had become Suffragette City, but it took a generation and many thousands of broken windows for women to secure the vote.
This is a walk in memory of the Pankhursts – Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia – fierce campaigners, resolute radicals. We visit their haunts, outline their struggle and follow in their footsteps.
An excerpt from the walk
When Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were arrested for disrupting the Liberal Party’s political rally at the Free Trade Hall in October 1905 they were taken first to a cell in Manchester Town Hall and then to Strangeways Prison.
Soon one of the leading Liberal politicians of the day turned up at the prison offering to pay the women’s fines so that they could be quickly released. The philanthropic politician was none other than Winston Churchill, MP for Oldham, who had recently crossed the floor from the Conservative benches. But was this really a welcome move or just a cynical one? Surely if the women agreed to his offer he could champion himself as being in control of them …
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