BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Manchester Walks - ECPv6.15.11//NONSGML v1.0//EN
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
X-WR-CALNAME:Manchester Walks
X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Manchester Walks
REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H
X-Robots-Tag:noindex
X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:UTC
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0000
TZOFFSETTO:+0000
TZNAME:UTC
DTSTART:20240101T000000
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251018T110000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251018T130000
DTSTAMP:20260421T170826
CREATED:20250902T190356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250902T190356Z
UID:26410-1760785200-1760792400@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Manchester & Slavery (on International Anti-Slavery Day)
DESCRIPTION:Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025 (International Anti-Slavery Day)\nStarts: 11am from Victoria Station wallmap.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \n \n  \n  \n  \n  \nManchester has hit the news big style! Simon Hattenstone in the the Guardian has “discovered” that the ship on the City of Manchester coat of arms is a slave ship. According to Hattenstone\, not just the city but the local football clubs should drop this “symbol of slavery shame” from their crests. Hattenstone quoted Jonathan Schofield who with his usual inability to research properly told Hattenstone that it wasn’t a slave ship. \nWell the ship on the Manchester coat of arms IS a slave ship and Ed Glinert has discovered which ship it was\, chosen for the coat of arms in 1838 when Manchester became a borough\, able to run its own affairs for the first time as opposed to being at the whim of the absentee landlords\, the Mosley family. \n*** \nManchester might have prospered from the horrors of slavery for much of the 18th century\, but the growing town was soon leading the campaign for its abolition. \nThe 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’”. \nManchester 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. \nWhile America continued to promote the system in the 19th 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. \nThis 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 19th 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. \nAt 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.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/manchester-slavery-on-international-anti-slavery-day/
LOCATION:Victoria Station Wallmap\, Victoria Station Approach\, Manchester\, M99 1ZW\, United Kingdom
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Slavery-Black-Joke.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251018T143000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251018T163000
DTSTAMP:20260421T170826
CREATED:20250911T132923Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250911T133113Z
UID:26425-1760797800-1760805000@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Charles Dickens in Manchester. Official Literary Festival Tours
DESCRIPTION:Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025\, during the Manchester Literature Festival.\nMeet: By the Queen Victoria statue\, Piccadilly Gardens\, 2.30pm.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.\nPrivate bookings: To book privately\, please phone Ed Glinert on 07769 29 8068. \nWhat a review on TripAdvisor! \nI booked myself and some Irish/Canadian visitors on a special Charles Dickens’s Manchester tour to coincide with the Manchester Literary Festival. It was a superb way to get new insights into some familiar parts of the city and to discover fascinating facts about places that I have often walked past without appreciating their historic and cultural significance. Ed Glinert\, our tour guide and author of “The Manchester Compendium” (also highly recommended\, available on amazon)\, was excellent. His selection of essential and quirky details\, delivered with dry wit in an east London accent\, were spot on. I was a student in Manchester in the 1980s and have family there so I now visit the city every month. The tour made me realise how much there is still to discover about the place and it was great to see how much my visitors\, on their first trip to the city\, enjoyed finding out about the place. I will definitely do more of New Manchester Walks tours and would highly recommend them. \n*** \nIt was the best of times; it was the worst of times. \nManchester in the early Victorian period was the commercial heart of the North-West\, the industrial heart of the world’s greatest empire\, a city of culture\, power and glory\, a city alive with the greatest figures of the age: Wellington and Peel\, Disraeli and Gladstone\, Tennyson and of course Charles Dickens. \n \nBritain’s most celebrated novelist came to the growing industrial metropolis of Manchester 19 times\, taking the platform at a fund-raiser in October 1843 for the Athenaeum alongside such reformers and notables as Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Cobden; partying with his pal and fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth; and visiting his sister in then desirable Ardwick. \nHe based the character of the crippled Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol on the son of a friend who owned an Ardwick cotton mill. Local industrialists the Grant Brothers\, William and Daniel\, were the prototypes for the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby. \nYet Dickens produced only one work on the Industrial Revolution – Hard Times (1854). The novel is set in a mythical Coketown\, possibly Manchester but also based on Preston. Though not one of his better works\, it is worth reading for its descriptions of working-class life. \nHe also spoke at and acted in the Free Trade Hall and was the guest of honour at the opening of the Free Library in 1852. \nWe will visit the haunts of those he met and knew\, stop by at the locations he might just recognise today\, and drop into the elegant Portico Library where the catalogue in the 1840s was organised by his friend James Crossley. \nUntil then\, sample this specimen from Hard Times: \nThe streets were hot and dusty on the summer day\, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown\, and could not be looked at steadily.  Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards\, and sat on  steps\, and posts\, and palings\, wiping their swarthy visages\, and contemplating  coals. \nThe whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it\, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it\, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants\, wasting with heat\, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate\, in hot weather and cold\, wet weather and dry\, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls\, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while\, for the summer hum of insects\, it could offer\, all the year round\, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday\, the whirr of shafts and wheels.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/26425/
LOCATION:Queen Victoria Statue\, Piccadilly Gardens\, United Kingdom
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR