Official Blue Badge Tours & Exciting Talks Covering Manchester, Liverpool & the North-West…100+ Tours & Talks to Choose From!

We are the only group of Manchester guides open to all official guides, plus experts in their field. We are the only group of north-west guides who can offer tours and talks in Manchester and Liverpool on everything – from the Pankhursts to Hacienda-era music tours and the Beatles’ Liverpool; from sights and sites associated with Alan Turing, Friedrich Engels, L. S. Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites to the glories of Manchester’s Victorian architecture, the horrors of slavery, the drama of Peterloo, Britain’s first canals, industry, science, cotton, Ancoats, Angel Meadow, Strangeways…
Perfect for visitors, tourists, locals, private groups, clubs, barmitzvahs, hens, stags, solo travellers…
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Coming to Manchester? Book a tour with Ed Glinert, the city’s main guide!

Coming to Manchester – from Boston, Bangkok, Basingstoke, Bermuda, Bahrain, or all points between? Then, book a tour with Ed Glinert, Manchester’s best informed and wittiest historian, Britain’s most prolific tour guide, Arts Society lecturer, cruise ships speaker, Penguin Classics editor, renowned author…and a general authority on anything worth knowing –  architecture, art, football, Jewish history, literature, politics…all the important stuff and a bit more. 
No “Rolls met Royce at the Midland Hotel” canards.
No “the 3 stripes on the city’s coat of arms are the 3 rivers of Manchester” nonsense.
No “the pillar box on Corporation Street is the one that survived the 1996 bomb” rubbish.
No “Mamucium was the city’s original name” idiocy.
Proper history!
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FREE Official Manchester Literature Festival Tours

This October, as every October, the Manchester Literature Festival is taking place, so we at New Manchester Walks are hosting our annual FREE literary tours. These tours are led by much-published author Ed Glinert, a Penguin Classics editor:

* Charles Dickens’ Manchester, Wednesday 18 October, 11am from the Queen Victoria statue in Piccadilly Gardens.
* Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester, Thursday 26 October, 11am from St Ann’s Church. The tour includes a visit to the Portico Library, where William Gaskell, Elizabeth’s husband, was chairman for 35 years in the mid-19th century, and after a stroll around town visiting Gaskellian haunts, a bus ride to Chorlton-on-Medlock to explore Dover Street, where the Gaskells first lived when they married in 1832, ending up natch at the Elizabeth Gaskell House.
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Next Jewish Manchester FREE tour: Sunday 22 October, with one of the country’s leading Jewish historians

Book here to join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and most prolific tour guide, an expert on Jewish history and religion, for the next Jewish Manchester tour: 2pm, Sunday, the 22nd of October. This is the only tour of Manchester’s old Jewish ghetto finding old synagogues, the building that was the centre of world Zionism, where you can hear about Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Maxwell and Karl Marx. (Two of those weren’t Jewish. Which two?), and a host of other mishugasim [Yiddish] .

We start at 2pm from the wallmap in Victoria Station, where thousands of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe arrived some 120 years ago fleeing persecution and seeking a better life – in America. So why were they in Manchester? Ah! Yes, and why do we go to Manchester Cathedral?! Please book on Eventbrite by pressing here.
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We are the only guides doing Smiths tours, Joy Division tours, Manchester music tours … with music!

This is Manchester, one of the world’s greatest music cities. The thing is, where Liverpool can only offer the Beatles, we have The Smiths! And Joy Division, The Fall, Oasis, New Order, Buzzcocks, John Cooper Clarke, Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, the Hollies and, can you believe it, Van Der Graaf Generator. Now that really is a legacy. Match that New York!
So, if you are coming to Manchester, from Venice Beach, Venice or Little Venice, book a private music tour with Mojo’s Ed Glinert, co-author of Fodor’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Traveller series, 40 years a music writer and the country’s most prolific tour guide.  
* PS. He loves the Beatles really. Well, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, not so much Abbey Road, natch, and does the most interesting Beatles tours in Liverpool as well.
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Recognition at last! Winners at the European Travel Awards. And praised in The Observer for our Beatles’ Liverpool tour!

Ed Glinert is delighted to announce that New Manchester Walks have won
“Best Walking City Tour Operator 2023 (Manchester)” in the 2023 European Travel Awards.

And this from the Observer March 2023.
No. 2 in “The best free spring culture in Britain, chosen by Observer critics”!
From the newspaper, “Marking 60 years since the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, this guided two-hour Liverpool traipse takes in the Cavern club, the Eleanor Rigby statue, George and Paul’s school, “the shabby flat where John Lennon dossed” and “Brian Epstein’s rather more comfortable apartment”. Host Ed Glinert is an accomplished author and walk leader who specialises in music and politics. Book via Eventbrite. Kitty Empire”
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Why does Central Library Look Like the Pantheon?

* The following article is now featured on the ILoveMcr website.
* New Manchester Walks’s architecture tours are the only expert architecture tours taking place in the city. They have been devised by RIBA judge Ed Glinert, aided as always by John Alker. Regular tours take place, and to see how much work we’ve put into this, please read this remarkable story about why Manchester Central Library is modelled on Rome’s Pantheon.

***

You may have noticed that Manchester’s Central Library looks like The Pantheon of Rome. It is so strikingly obvious. But it begs the question why?
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Calling schools, students and teachers! Book an official guide to enrich your students on all things Manchester and Liverpool: the Pankhursts, Peterloo, Slavery, the Industrial Revolution…

We’ve been taking more and more groups on educational walking tours, covering all aspects of Manchester history.

We do Liverpool as well!

Please e-mail edglinert@yahoo.co.uk for a great day out for your class.

When Glinert gave a talk on Alan Turing at Manchester Library a few years ago one mother wrote to say it was the best lesson (of sorts) she’d heard and asked her mum why can’t school be more like that?

Well, that’s because Ed Glinert is the most entertaining speaker in the area, giving talks to a variety of clubs, societies and organisations, on cruise ships and to the Arts Society. That’s it.
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