Gorton is a bit, well, industrial, and run down, but it does boast of one of the most beautiful (former) churches in the country; a world heritage site no less – Gorton Monastery.

We meet there (in the Friars’ Pantry) for a breathtaking tour of a breathtaking building, followed by a short step across the eerie streets outside, taking in stories of industrial imperialism and post-war dereliction, returning for a bite of soul food.

The tour is led by Ed Glinert, one of the monastery’s official guides and joint founder of New Manchester Walks.

Manchester’s most important building, a Victorian palace built as a celebration of free trade, (the system that made the city rich), is now the city’s only 5-Star hotel, stamping ground of the beautiful people: Kylie Minogue, Bill Clinton, Sven and Gordon Brown (!)

When the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow wanted to know about the history of Manchester Town Hall for their recently shown extravaganza, they approached New Manchester Walks’ Ed Glinert (author of “The Manchester Compendium”). When The One-Show wanted to know more about the Town Hall Murals they contacted Glinert.

So when looking for a tour of this municipal palace do like them and choose New Manchester Walks!

Let the experts take you round.

* See “Walks & Tours” section for more details.

Christabel: suffragette icon, arrested at the Free Trade Hall, locked in Strangeways.

Sylvia: suffragette icon who argued with Lenin and befriended Haile Selassie. MI5 called her “the tiresome Miss Sylvia Pankhurst”.

Emmeline: suffragette icon, Independent Labour Party campaigner, Tory Party candidate.

Walk in the footsteps of the Pankhursts, the family that won women the vote.

No money, a 70-hour week, beer laced with ammonia, pickled tripe, cholera, lice, soot, smoke, sordid sex, no TV or computer, no political rights, a jerry-built house, no decent music, huge queues to buy the 500th installment of Mr Dickens’s latest and dead at 17. Bah, humbug.

The greatest collection of art treasures ever seen, Britain’s oldest orchestra, and the country’s most spectacular theatre.

The story of the world’s best-known orchestra and its greatest baton-wielders – Richter, Beecham, Barbirolli, Nagano and Halle himself!

The man who united Manchester was born on this day in 1909. Relive the life and the legend. (For fuller description of this tour, see http://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/walks-tours/people-george-best-to-the-pankhursts/matt-busby-the-man-who-made-manchester-united-2/