This is the full 2-hour extravaganza, as seen on TV and featured in the best newspapers. This is the most popular walking tour in the country, surpassing even London Walks’s Jack the Ripper tour.

That’s because New Manchester Walks has pieced together an extraordinary set of thrilling stories about Second World War horrors, about the buildings Hitler wanted saved from destruction, about Manchester’s atomic bunker and the Cold War – all linked in with a nasty graveyard story and even Coronation Street.

Under Deansgate, away from the city noise, it’s dark, damp, dank and dismally smelly. Just give thanks that you don’t have to go down there night after night to escape the bombs.

This is the next set of dates:

Sat 9 June, Sun 17 June, Sat 30 June - at various times.

* Booking only through www.quaytickets.com/0843 2

Smith had a hard life and a broken childhood in impoverished east Manchester in the 1950s and ’60s, and on marrying Myra Hindley’s sister, Maureen, had the misfortune to meet the loathsome Ian Brady, unquestionably the most evil figure in the city’s history. Brady had gone from petty crime to planning major escapades and then onto carrying out sickening attacks on children.

He ensnared Smith into aspects of his criminal domain, but not the sordid elements, and when Smith was cajoled into watching Brady’s final criminal act as a free man – the cold-blooded murder of 17-year-old Edward Evans in October 1965 (picked up by the milk-vending machine at Central Station) – he decided he’d had enough and shopped Brady and Hindley to the police.

Officers arrived at the murder scene, Hindley’s grandmother’s council flat in Hattersley, and arrested Brady for what they thought was a pedestrian murder, unaware that they had caught the perpetrator of the disappearance of and, it turned out, the sadistic murders of a number of young children from east Manchester over the previous few years.

Smith was innocent of these murders but the public, rather than thanking him for ending the atrocities, for being the chief witness for the prosecution, hounded him, claiming “he must have known”. He didn’t. David Smith died of cancer in early March 2012 in Ireland.

We sail, well, glide through the water – the Bridgewater Canal, Ship Canal, River Irwell and Ship Canal – on Wednesday 16 May, leaving from the canal arm by the Castlefield Hotel on Liverpool Road at 6pm. Price: £15. Please book through www.quaytickets.com.

Our guides have spoken to a variety of social clubs, at the Portico Library, to student groups, during the Histories Festival, to church and synagogue members, to the U3A, to library clubs…

Drop us an e-mail – info@newmanchesterwalks.com – for more information.

New Manchester Walks is hosting a new series of talks in conjunction with the wonderful King’s Arms pub on Bloom Street, central Salford (5 minutes walk from the People’s History Museum).

The first one is on Sat 5 May at 1pm when Ed Glinert waxes forth on the history of The Smiths in honour of the 30th anniversary of the founding of Manchester’s greatest group. On 19 August he’s doing the Peterloo Massacre.

Listen to the most garrulous man in Manchester relating key episodes in the city’s history without having to cross any roads or get wet. Tickets: £3.

The first official royal visit was by James I in 1617. The king visited the Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) where he heard the usually absent warden, Richard Murray, preach a rare sermon and citing the line from Romans 1: “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ”. When Murray later went to kiss the king’s hand James, who had previously clashed with the cleric, retorted: “Mon, thou art not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, but by God the gospel of Christ may be ashamed of thee!”

A century later in November 1745, James’s great-great grandson, Charles Edward Stuart, (better known as Bonnie Prince Charlie), dropped into the church with his ragtail army to say prayers en route to London where they would attempt to seize back the throne for the deposed Stuart line. His grandfather, James II, had been forced out in 1688 for being a Catholic and the throne was now in the hands of distant cousins from Hanover. Protestants, whose head paterfamilias were mostly called George.

The Bonnie Prince, born in Rome, and who died in Rome, but is usually cited as Scottish, never made it to the capital. His army turned back at Derby, later returned to the Manchester church for more spiritual sustenance, and were eventually vanquished at Culloden.

The most unlikely of royal visitors to the Cathedral has to be Edward VIII. He was on the throne for less than a year and therefore largely unable to fill the country with mementos. A rare reminder of his short reign is the army banner for the Grenadier Guards which he hoisted in July 1936 above the Cathedral’s north door. Edward, or to be more accurate, David (his real name), had served with the regiment during the Great War but was not allowed to fight due to being heir to the throne.

Queen Victoria appeared in Manchester on several occasions, and was the first royal to make a habit of touring the country performing public deeds. In 1851 a Guard of Honour of the Yeoman Cavalry accompanied her royal party as far as Cross Lane, the boundary between Pendleton and Salford. There they were dismissed for fear of disturbances, political commentators believe, for the Peterloo Massacre was still fresh in people’s minds. The Queen was received in Manchester not at the Town Hall on King Street but in the Cotton Exchange which from then on became the Royal Exchange.

The Queen and Albert returned six years later for the Great Art Treasures Exhibition held at Old Trafford, but the Queen was not here in 1877 to open Manchester Town Hall, despite being invited to do so. We have no idea if the subject of Victoria’s refusal occupied the conversation of the current Queen and her Manchester chaperones this time around, but what an interesting discussion it would have made. Sir Richard Leese might have explained to her Majesty that the Queen stayed away for fear of appearing on the same platform as Abel Heywood, the then Mayor. Heywood had been a fiery revolutionary in his youth, jailed for failing to pay stamp duty on his newspaper, the Poor Man’s Guardian, which occasionally spouted republican views. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Heywood’s wife, Elizabeth, had commissioned a huge statue of Oliver Cromwell – yes, Cromwell, the regicide; Cromwell, the man who had ordered the execution of Charles I – a statue that had originally been placed in Manchester at the end of … Victoria Street … but now rests in Wythenshawe Park.

In 1894 Queen Victoria returned to the city to open the Manchester Ship Canal. Since then each ruling monarch has appeared in Manchester on several occasions, though none experienced so embarrassing an incident as George V who opened the Central Reference Library in 1934. The King had to wait outside while the official inside fumbled to find the key. Since then royal visitors have cut ribbons instead of waiting to find someone who can open a door.

• We will be running our Royal Manchester walk in the run-up to the Diamond Jubilee bank holidays at 12 noon on Thu 24 May, meeting at the Visitor Centre. We will also be running a Diamond Jubilee canal cruise on Tue 5  June at 11.30am, bookable only through Quaytickets.  

Next tours: Wed 9 May (10.30am), Thu 9 Aug (11am).

Meet: outside St Ann’s Church.

St Ann’s is the only surviving Protestant church in Manchester city centre. Wealthy worshippers unhappy with the High Church nature of the services at what is now the Cathedral in the early 18th century decided to build a new church in what had been Acresfield but was now being colonised as a smart new part of town.

At St Ann’s the congregation would use the Book of Common Prayer and support the Protestant line of succession – that George, elector of Hanover, was the appropriate heir to Queen Anne (who died in 1714), solely because he was a Protestant even though he was 51st in line to the throne. In contrast at what is now the Cathedral they preferred the immediate family of the recently deposed James II – the Stuarts or Jacobites as they became known – who to the chagrin of much of the country were Catholics.

St Ann’s was consecrated in 1712 to the designs of John Barker, a pupil of Christopher Wren. Indeed it resembles Wren’s St Lawrence Jewry in the City of London. The church’s best feature are its stained glass windows which reveal connections with freemasonry and the Kabbalah (the body of Hebrew mysticism). More surprisingly perhaps these windows used to be part of the structure at long-demolished nearby churches.

After we’ve related these stories we will walk to the John Rylands Library, possibly through the mediaeval alleys, to catch an awe-inspiring first view of the great and grand Gothic palace, and then explore within in detail.