Next walk: Sunday 5 March 2023 
Meet: Friedrich Engels Statue, outside HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Gaythorn, 2pm.
Booking: Please press here to register with Eventbrite.

Friedrich Engels, who created communism with Karl Marx, spent the best part of twenty-five years of his life working as a cotton spinner and merchant in Manchester and Salford, keeping his campaigning activities a secret to safeguard his job and so that he could rake in the postal orders and ride with the Cheshire Hunt.

Away from Manchester, Engels and Marx were doing their best to create a new philosophy that would do away with the hated capitalism system of the bosses and the money men.

Join Ed Glinert, who was once a member of a Trotskyite cell in Hulme that was so secret all the members had pseudonyms, although he can’t remember what his was, on this entertaining, enthralling, wild and witty tour which details Engels’s and Marx’s sojourns not just in Manchester.

Walkers of the world unite!

Next walking tour: Sat 4 March 2023, 11 a.m.
Meet: Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens.
Booking: Please press here to register with Eventbrite.

***

Boho Manchester, cool Manchester, modish Manchester, funky but chic Manchester.

It’s the Northern Quarter, the ’hood east of Piccadilly Gardens. A land of crumbling cotton factories, sky-scraping fire-escapes, Bohemian bars, downhome hidden spaces, cult markets, chic galleries and cardamom-scented, sizzingly-cheap curry cafes; a style haven shaped in marble, steel and beechwood, with streets named in Mediterranean tiles and pavements slabbed in mosaic.

There’s even a great history of political turmoil, a stretch of the last remaining back-to-back houses in Manchester, and testaments to the great figures who have walked its streets, like Abel Heywood, L. S. Lowry and Emmeline Pankhurst.

Join the hardest-working tour guide and historian in Manchester, Ed Glinert, who was once Boho, cool and modish, funky and chic, in this in-depth trawl and trail through the land that the destructive developers forgot.

* It’s old Manchester renewed and new Manchester refreshed. It’s good. It’s modern.

Next FREE walking tour: Tuesday 28 February 2023, 10.30 a.m.
Meet: Outside Manchester Art Gallery
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

A remarkable tour of concealed city sites you always wanted to see, the history lovibly explored and explained.
* The Portico Library with its gorgeous dome and bibliophic reading room.
* The Freemasons’ Hall.
* The Hidden Gem itself.
* The glorious interior of St Ann’s church with its stained glass and Renaissance painting.
* The almost forgotten Lesser Free Trade Hall.

All walks meet at: Victoria Station wallmap (not the window list of battles!).

This Tour Sunday 26 February 2023, 1pm
Meet: Victoria Station Wallmap
Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

“The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy, and most wicked locality in Manchester…full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants and tramps.”

Was this yesterday? No, journalist Angus Bethune Reach was writing in the 19th century when Angel Meadow was one of a number of notorious Manchester slums; probably the worst.

This is what proto-communist Friedrich Engels had to say about the locale in 1844. “The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low water level of the Irk … utterly uninhabitable, [it] stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when an open ground-floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities. . . .”

A hundred yards on, at the end of Millow Street, stood “Gibraltar”. This was once described by the social commentator James Phillips Kay as the haunt of the “lowest” of the population. “The stranger, if he dare venture to explore its intricacies and recesses is sure to be watched with suspicion, on every side is heard the sound of the axe or knife…”

Okay, both those revered social commentators were writing many years ago, but go there now and it’s pretty grim, which is why we guide you around these atmospheric areas, converting the squalor and sordidness into scintillating stories. And we’ve not even entered Angel Meadow proper yet.

Have things improved? Yes, with much thanks to the Friends of Angel Meadow. When we’ve finished with all the terrible tales we deserve an ale or two at the Marble pub with its gorgeous tiles, magnificent ales and friendly atmosphere.

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 “Manchester Architecture Revealed” 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 19^th century right through the ages to today’s stunning skyscrapers.
Meet Central Library steps 2pm

Next walking tour: Tuesday 21 February 2023.
Meet: On Toft Road, above Knutsford Station.
Starting time: 12 noon.
Booking: Please press here to book with eventbrite.

This is a sumptuous tour laced with character and charisma, for this is the classiest village in the vicinity, smouldering with salubriousness and serenity.

We will stroll around town to hear about Mrs Gaskell and Cranford, Alan Turing, the highwayman Edward Higgins, Tatton Park and wartime saboteurs, and, if you walk quickly enough, a saunter along the most remarkable street in England; maddening, mad, marvellous architecture.

At the end we will collapse into the Legh Arms for a much-needed pint.

* For more information see elsewhere on this site: http://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/walks-tours/places-ancoats-to-worsley/knutsford-classy-cranford-in-chi-chi-cheshire/

For more information see elsewhere on this site: http://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/walks-tours/places-ancoats-to-worsley/knutsford-classy-cranford-in-chi-chi-cheshire/

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No description has been entered for this event.

This tour: Saturday 18 February 2023, 2pm.
Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

You think you know Manchester? Well, no one knows it like Ed Glinert who has spent 40 years unturning every last (Gothic) stone in the city, uncovering layer upon layer of other histories, lesser-known stories, the secret side of the city to create the ultimate “believe it or not”.

On this we hear about:
* The atomic bunker under Piccadilly Gardens.
* Racist GIs during the Second World War and the drama they caused.
* The planned demolition of the Town Hall.
* L. S. Lowry, the secret sadist.
* The attack on the paintings at the Art Gallery.
* The pillar box that didn’t survive the 1996 IRA bomb events.

It’s the Manchester that nobody knows…apart from Glinert and you after you’ve been on this tour!

Next tour: Sunday 12 February 2023.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 2pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

Manchester might have prospered from the horrors of slavery for much of the 18^th century, but the growing town was soon leading the campaign for its abolition.

The turning point was a meeting held at the Manchester Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) on 28 October 1787 fronted by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. “When I went into the church,” Clarkson recalled, “it was so full that I could scarcely get to my place; for notice had been publicly given, though I knew nothing of it, that such a discourse would be delivered. I was surprised also to find a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit. There might be forty or fifty of them. The text that I took, as the best to be found in such a hurry, was the following: ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’”.

Manchester amassed the biggest number of signatures for the petition against slavery that went before Parliament. Sadly the petition was destroyed when the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834.

While America continued to promote the system in the 19^th century, Manchester led the move for Stateside abolition even though most of the raw cotton that fuelled the Manchester economy was picked by slaves in the Deep South.

This tour cuts straight to the heart of one of the most controversial and disturbing social systems ever devised. We hear how Manchester families such as the Heywoods and Gregs who benefited from slavery became its biggest opponents. We explain how the “Slavery Triangle” (Lancashire-America-Africa-Lancashire…) kept the system going, relate the stories of the escaped slaves such as Henry “Box” Brown, who once posted himself in a box from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia and who visited Manchester, and discuss how leading 19^th century local Liberals such as John Bright and Richard Cobden not only kept the anti-slavery campaign flourishing but were even in contact with Abraham Lincoln.

At the Town Hall we hear about the ground-breaking 5th Pan-African Congress of 1945 which catalysed the post-war push for independence. At the Free Trade Hall we hear about the visits of Paul Robeson and how he was barred from leaving America in the 1950s. We finish the tour at the Abraham Lincoln statue in Lincoln Square, naturally.