Coronation Street at 65! Classic Corrie Manchester Tour
Next tour is on the 65th anniversary of the first episode: Tuesday 9 December 2025.
Meet: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street, 11.30am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
***
Coronation Street is now 65 glorious years old and we are marking the occasion with a nostalgic tour to celebrate Classic Corrie.
So join legendary Corrie tour guide Willie Eckerslike, one of the very few official Manchester tour guides who has taken groups down the cobbles, on a rip-roaring, mind-blowing, eye-opening trail through the great stories from Coronation Street’s golden days in city centre Manchester.
* The pub where the name “Coronation Street” was devised.
* Whatever remains of Granadaland before it goes.
* The block where that lowlife, John Stape, tried to commit suicide.
* The ornate location where Alf wed Audrey.
* The church where Betty’s funeral service was held.
* The apartment where John Savident (Fred Elliot) met his nemesis.
* Fiz’s Restaurant.
How it all began
“Now the next thing you want to do is get a signwriter in. That sign above the door will have to be changed.”
Those were the opening lines of the world’s most famous television programme, spoken by Elsie Lappin to Florrie Lindley on 9 Dec 1960. Florrie replied: “It’ll seem funny ’avin me name outside me own shop.”
What about that? Not even Ken Barlow to Ena Sharples. But those lines ushered in a phenomenon, an institution, that is now 65 years old.
Coronation Street was not an instant success. Granada only commissioned 13 episodes. Few within the company thought it would last its run. However something caught the viewers’ imagination. Perhaps it was the liberal use of Northern phrases like “eh”, “chuck”, “nowt”. Perhaps it was the Dickensian gravitas of the cast’s names (purloined from Pendlebury Church graveyard). Perhaps it was the setting: Archie Street, Ordsall, with its compact terraced houses, backyards, corner shop, pub and church, less than a mile from Grandaland.
Sixty-five years of drama and farce, life, loves and laughs have followed on Britain’s most famous TV street, land of cobbles, factories, terraced houses, Kabin and Rovers Return.
Its success has been buoyed by the wonderfully drawn cast of characters past and present – Vera & Jack, Hilda & Stan, Elsie, Ena, Ken and Len, Bet and Betty, Liz and Lloyd, Steve and Norris, Stape and Fiz, Sonny Jim and Schmeichel (R.I.P. big fella).
Here’s a great story
When Julie Goodyear first turned up at Granada to play Bet Lynch in 1966, a friend gave her a lift into Manchester in his van. In the back was a cement mixer. Julie expected the pal to drop her on the main road, but as it was raining he insisted in pulling up outside the TV company’s front entrance on Atherton Street. By an amazing coincidence Pat Phoenix was just getting out of her Rolls Royce at the same time. Pat looked Julie up and down “as if I were a piece of dog dirt on her shoe,” as Julie recalled, and said, “‘Don’t you ever, ever dare to upstage me again, young lady.’”
