Manchester Walks

The Little Ireland Explorer (Manchester) on St Patrick's Day
2026-03-17 14:30 - 16:30 UTC | HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, Select a State:, M15 4GU, United Kingdom
Next tour: The Little Ireland Explorer (Manchester) on St Patrick’s Day
Tuesday 17 March 2026.
Meet: Outside HOME, 2.30 p.m.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

For 2026, we’re doing it a little differently, exploring Little Ireland as well as focusing on great Irishmen and women who have made their mark on Manchester.
Little Ireland was the ghetto/slum/rookery around the railway viaduct that stretched from London Road station (now Piccadilly) to Gaythorn (where HOME now stands).
This is a little-known, seldom-heard side of Manchester history. The working-class community around St Augustine’s Catholic church was bombed in the 1940s and redeveloped out in the 1950s. Of the church, there’s nothing left, apart from the pictures, the memories and the great stories. UMIST replaced it. A new church was built in Grosvenor Square, half a mile away.
The best known story around here is Friedrich Engels’s description of Little Ireland from Condition of the Working Class, but you’ll have to come on the tour to hear that!
As for those great Irish men. There’s Brendan Behan: genius writer or terrorist? In 1939 Behan spent a night inside Bootle Street police station in 1939 after entering Britain illegally. He had been banned from the country under the Prevention of Violence Act after shooting at three policemen. But on being released, during an amnesty, he came to Manchester at the invitation of the local IRA cell, thereby reneging on the deal.
In Manchester, Behan was arrested by Robert Mark, then a detective constable in the Special Branch, who went on to become Commissionaire of the Metropolitan Police. In court Behan was given an extra four months on his jail sentence, despite or perhaps because of the pleas of his lawyer who kept referring to the writer as a “love choild of the Oirish revolution”.
No wonder Karl Marx urged Britain to solve the Irish question before choosing socialism.
But don’t worry, we won’t get too political. We’ll also talk about George Best, Phil Lynott, Little Ireland, Irish Town and find some time for a chorus or two of the Waxie’s Dargle.

Secret Manchester (The Official Tour)
2026-03-21 14:15 - 16:00 | Mercure Hotel (outside), Portland Street, Manchester, M1 4PH, United Kingdom
Next tour: Sat 21 March 2026, 2.15 p.m.
Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Evenbrite.
***
You think you know Manchester? Well, no one knows it like Ed Glinert, who has spent 45 years unturning every last (Gothic) stone in the city, uncovering layer upon layer of other histories, lesser-known stories, the secret side of the city to create the ultimate “believe it or not”.
* Did you know there is an atomic bunker under Piccadilly Gardens and Chinatown with a branch leading to the Town Hall?
* That L. S. Lowry was a secret sadist.
* Did you know there were race riots in the city during the Second World War thanks to the presence of an invading army.
* Did you know that the pillar box on Corporation Street is NOT the one that survived the 1996 IRA bomb?
* Did you know the council voted to demolish the Town Hall?
* Do you know how many secret service agents are in the Midland Hotel right now planting bugs?
It’s the Manchester that nobody knows…apart from Glinert and you after you’ve been on this tour!

Here’s something else you didn’t know (we hope). During the Second World War the Government requisitioned a well-known building in Manchester city centre to be a secret regional HQ, to take over the running of not just Manchester but the entire North-West should Nazi invasion look imminent.
It was kitted out with the most sophisticated communications equipment, food and beds. Winston Churchill, prime minister, even kipped there one night to show how safe it was. But of course it was never needed. Where is it? Ah…
This is a trip into the deepest historical secrets of Manchester. Sites, streets, spaces that you’ve walked past a thousand times will never look the same again. The tour is conducted by Ed Glinert, who knows Manchester better than anyone and knows the things that nobody else (apart from the people who told him) knows.

The Pre-Raphaelites in Manchester. Expert Tour
2026-03-31 14:30 - 16:15 | Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
Next tour: Tuesday 31 March 2026, 2.30 p.m.
Meet: Outside Manchester Art Gallery.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Ed Glinert, official Manchester tour guide and author of Penguin’s Manchester Compendium, leads this fascinating fact-filled tour around the gallery’s best-loved Victorian paintings.
The Pre-Raphaelites were Britain’s most important art school. They were aesthetes and zealots determined to bring honesty, drama and colourful vitality to staid Victorian painting.
They were formed in 1848, the year of revolution across Europe. But this was no political coup. This was art terrorism, powered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
Reacting against the reactionary nature of Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy, the Pre-Raphaelites wished to create a body of work similar in brightness of colour, attention to detail, and honest simplicity to the period of Italian painting prior to Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520).
Rossetti wanted the group’s name to include the then fashionable term “Early Christian”, but when Hunt objected he proposed “Pre-Raphaelite”. Rossetti then added the word “Brotherhood”, as he wanted the society to be secret, in line with the Italian political group the Carbonaris in that year of revolution across Europe. When the artists staged their first exhibition Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was signed “PRB” to maintain the society’s air of mystery.
Manchester has an unrivalled collection of the PRB’s works, dominated by William Holman Hunt’s spiritual Light of the World, his daring Shadow of Death and the eerie Scapegoat. This is art which benefits from intense scrutiny; from unravelling and demystifying the religious connotations and human dramas involved.
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Only Ed Glinert, official Manchester tour guide and Arts Society lecturer, can reveal the mysteries and symbolism of the gallery’s best loved Victorian paintings.

The Pre-Raphaelites were Britain’s most important art school. They were aesthetes and zealots determined to bring honesty, drama and colourful vitality to staid Victorian painting.
They were formed in 1848, the year of revolution across Europe. But this was no political coup. This was art terrorism, powered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.
Reacting against the reactionary nature of Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy, they wished to create a body of work similar in brightness of colour, attention to detail, and honest simplicity to the period of Italian painting prior to Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520).
Rossetti wanted the group’s name to include the then fashionable term “Early Christian”, but when Hunt objected he proposed “Pre-Raphaelite”. Rossetti then added the word “Brotherhood”, as he wanted the society to be secret, in line with the Italian political group the Carbonaris in that year of revolution across Europe. When the artists staged their first exhibition Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Girlhood of Mary Virgin was signed “PRB” to maintain the society’s air of mystery.
Manchester has an unrivalled collection of the PRB’s works, dominated by William Holman Hunt’s spiritual Light of the World, his daring Shadow of Death and the eerie Scapegoat. This is art which benefits from intense scrutiny; from unravelling and demystifying the religious connotations and human dramas involved.

The Great Treasures of Manchester
2026-04-02 11:00 - 13:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
This tour: Thu 2 April 2026, 2.30pm.
Meet: Victoria station wallmap.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Join Ed Glinert, author of the city’s definitive history, “Manchester: The Biography”, on this tribute to the great treasures of Manchester.

Chetham’s – Europe’s oldest library.
The Trinity painting inside Manchester Cathedral.
The glorious stained Glass inside St Ann’s Church
The Stations of the Cross in the Hidden Gem.
The secrets of the Albert Memorial
The meaning behind the city’s coat of arms.
Manchester Art Gallery’s greatest painting
… and more.

The Evil Corners of Strangeways (Ed Glinert's Criminal Tour)
2026-04-10 14:30 - 16:15 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
Next tour: Fri 10 April 2026.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap for a 2.30pm start.
Booking: If you’d like to go to Strangeways, the law will help you.
Alternatively, just follow the orders from the guv’nor below.
Oh, alright: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Bring: Bucket for slopping out.
End: Somewhere near the guv’nor’s office.
***
Strangeways. The very name enough to send a frisson of fear down the spine of the most hardened felons.
Strangeways has been home to the most evil elements in existence – Ian Brady and Harold Shipman – and temporary refuge of political prisoners such as Christabel Pankhurst and Austin Stack, the Irish Republican who was one of the few to escape from its clutches.
Even Ian Brown, ex-Stone Roses, was briefly incarcerated within in 1998. No, not for inflicting his tuneless drone and inane lyrics on humanity but for getting into a strop on an aeroplane. 60 days. So what was it like in Strangeways, Ian? “Dirty. The food was like dog food.” He’s out now.
Ian Brady was sent here for stealing from Smithfield Market, where he worked in the late 1950s. John Robson Walby (alias Gwynne Owen Evans), was hanged at Strangeways on August 13, 1964 – the last person in England to suffer this punishment. (No, it wasn’t Ruth Ellis).
1 April 1990 three hundred prisoners filed into the chapel to attend the church service. During the sermon a prisoner, later identified as Paul Taylor, stood up and shouted: “I would just like to say, right, that this man has just talked about the blessing of the heart and how a hardened heart can be delivered. No it cannot, not with resentment, anger and bitterness and hatred being instilled in people.”
It all kicked off. Riot!
Prisoners took to the roof and began to dismantle the prison for 25 days. 147 staff and 47 prisoners were injured. One prisoner and one prison officer died. Your NMW guide, Ed Glinert, was ordered by his editor at the Sun to doorstep home secretary David Waddington. He never made it.
Later, Paul Taylor and Alan Lord faced a five-month trial as its ringleaders. Both were acquitted of murder. The riot resulted in the Woolfe Inquiry which ended the practice of slopping out and saw the jail rebuilt and euphemistically renamed as Her Majesty’s Prison, Manchester. But to everyone else it’s still good old Strangeways, or in Jim McDonald’s words: “The Big Hoise.”

Alan Turing's Manchester: Expert Tour
2026-04-15 14:30 - 16:00 | Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Next walking tour: Wednesday 15 April 2026, 2.30 p.m.
Meeting Place: Manchester Museum entrance, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Alan Turing has gone down in history as the man who didn’t invent the computer! He should have, in the 1940s, but didn’t have the spare parts to do so. When he discovered to his chagrin that mathematicians at Manchester University had beaten him to it in the summer of 1948 into building the world’s first programmable computer he contacted the department and had little difficulty convincing them he should be hired; his reputation went before him.
We now know, though it was a secret at the time, that Alan Turing had had an excellent war, heavily involved in cracking the supposedly uncrackable codes that the Nazis had encrypted into their Enigma machine. Turing had been a maths prodigy as a boy. At the age of 14 his first day at Sherborne school coincided with the 1926 General Strike. So determined was he to attend school, he biked it 60 miles to the school, stopping overnight at an inn. At Sherborne he developed an interest in the latest mathematical philosophies, in particular Bertrand Russell’s paradox: “the set of all tea cups is not a member of itself, but the set of all non-tea cups is”, its beautiful and simple resonance so influential in the development of logic as a science.
At Cambridge University Turing developed the idea of a thinking electronic machine but lacked the parts to build one. Manchester had succeeded (find out more on our Oxford Road/University/Science walks) and Turing helped extend the department’s knowledge of primitive computer technology, working in a small brick office on Coupland Street.
It all went wrong for Turing in the 1950s after he picked up a boy at the Regal Cinema on Oxford Street (now the Dancehouse Theatre) and took him home. The boy allegedly tried to blackmail Turing, and the mathematician went to the police. When they discovered that there had been a (then illegal) homosexual relationship between the two men they turned the tables on Turing and prosecuted him for gross indecency. His conviction led to the removal of his security clearance at a time of public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents. He was forced to take hormones to “cure” him of his sexual leanings which made him grow breasts, and on 8 June 1954 Turing’s cleaner found him dead. The cause was established as cyanide poisoning.
Did Alan Turing commit suicide, depressed about his career and life being in ruins, or was his death an accident brought on by failing to take care following one of his numerous chemical experiments? A further complication to the drama suggests that Turing was re-creating a scene from his favourite film, Snow White, and that he deliberately executed an ambiguous death to save his mother from too much embarrassment.
Alan Turing was cremated at Woking; his life-size statue occupies pride of place in Sackville Park, where we end the tour.
*****
• Many thanks to Jury’s Inn, Manchester, for supporting our tour. Here is their excellent tribute.
Alan Turing of Manchester, by Jurys Inn Manchester Hotel

Magritte: The Traditionalist Surrealist. Ed Glinert talk at Stockport Art Gallery
2026-05-03 14:00 - 15:00

The Glories of Liverpool Architecture. Ed Glinert talk for Lytham Arts Society
2026-05-06 14:00 - 15:00

Annual Swiss Club Tour
2026-05-10 15:00 - 17:00

Tour the Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester
2026-05-21 11:00 - 13:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
“The Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester”
This tour: Thursday 21 May 2026.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 11 am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
***
Here’s the full S.P.
The Manchester area is home to Britain’s second biggest Jewish community. Yet it was not until 1788, just over a hundred years after Oliver Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to the country, that the first recorded Jewish presence appeared in Manchester: Hamilton Levi, a flower dealer of Long Millgate, listed in that year’s trade directory.
Ironically, Manchester’s first Jewish community settled around the parish church (what is now Manchester Cathedral), for that was where the old town was located.
Like the Germans and Irish who were settling locally at the same time, the Jews saw in Manchester, cradle of the industrial revolution, opportunities for trade. They opened their first synagogue in 1794 in a warehouse on Garden Street, a barely noticeable alley at the side of what is now the Printworks, the building long gone, near their burial ground. It was paid for by Samuel Solomon, a well-known quack doctor, responsible for the supposed cure-all “Balm of Gilead” which could allegedly cure all ills.

Celebrating Salford's Centenary (Salford Quays Tour)
2026-05-22 14:00 - 15:40 | Salford Quays Metrolink Stop, Trafford Road, Salford, M50 3WL, United Kingdom
Next tour: Friday 22 May 2026.
Meet: Salford Quays Metrolink stop, 2 p.m.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Huge docks which once harboured the world’s ocean-going liners. Gleaming museums of the modern age. A world famous canal, as deep as Suez, as powerful as the Panama.

Here a new city has risen; a city of glass, steel and burnished metal, bold and brilliant. On one side of the water the silver shards of the Imperial War Museum North. On the other the Lowry Centre, a matchless theatre for the matchstick figure artist. And they have now been joined by Media City, the futuristic home of the BBC.
Alongside, stretches the water, filling the old Manchester Docks, cleaned and spruced for leisure and pleasure.
We explore the new city on the old canal, switching to and from the hi-tech world of today to the days when the Port of Manchester thrived as the 4th largest in the country.

The Grand Canals of Manchester
2026-05-23 11:00 - 13:00 | Outside the Malmaison Hotel, 3 Piccadilly, Manchester, Select a State:, M1 3AQ, United Kingdom
* Next tour: Saturday, the 23rd of May 2026, 11 a.m.
* Meet: outside the Malmaison Hotel, 1-3 Piccadilly.
* Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
“Streets full of water. Please advise.”
Surely Mark Twain was reporting back from Manchester, not Venice, for the city is a font of watery ways and walks? Built during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the Rochdale Canal, the Ashton Canal and their tributaries brought coal and cotton to central Manchester, and took away manufactured goods to be sent around the world. Then the work stopped and the canals silted up, but over the last fifty years the canals have been wonderfully restored.
Join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian, for a celebratory saunter along the great waterways.
This is a spectacular stroll along the waterways of Manchester, invoking a host of stories industrial and architectural, anecdotal and incidental, as we head west from Piccadilly, along the canals under the city streets towards Britain’s grand canal junction at Castlefield where four waterways cross.
We’ve changed the route for this tour to take in the city centre and Ancoats.

Usual Route: Malmaison – the Venetian-styled Crown Court – Canal Street – the Gay Village – Alan Turing – Bloom Street power station – under Oxford Street – Lee House – the Ritz – Manchester & Salford Junction Canal detour – the Hacienda – Roman fort – Castlefield Canal Basin – Duke’s 92.

Emmeline Pankhurst’s Manchester
2026-05-26 14:00 - 15:40 | emmeline Pankhurst statue, St Peter's Square, Manchester, M2 3DE, United Kingdom
Next Tour: No dates yet.
Meet: At the Emmeline Pankhurst Statue, St Peter’s Square.
Booking: Please press here to book with Evenbrite.
It is now more than a hundred and five years (1 December 1919) since a woman entered the British Parliament for the first time. American socialite Nancy Astor won a by-election for the Unionists in Plymouth Sutton, ironically replacing her husband, Waldorf Astor, who had just been ennobled.
The campaign to win women the vote and the right to enter the Commons had been raging ever since more than a dozen people were killed and hundreds injured at the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. Henry Hunt, the main speaker at the Peterloo rally that never happened, later became the first MP to put forward a bill to allow women to vote in general elections. But that was back in the 1830s. Two generations later the Pankhurst family took over the campaign, leading one of the most bitter and brutal political battles in British history, for many years from Manchester.
Partial victory was celebrated in 1918 when (some) women were at last allowed to vote and stand. One woman was elected, but never took her seat. A year later Nancy Astor made up for it.
Hear the full story on this eye-opening guided tour.

!!STOP PRESS!!
This is the only Pankhurst tour which goes to the Pankhursts’ shop (yes, I bet you didn’t know they had a shop in Manchester city centre!) and gives the accurate political background to the infamous Free Trade Hall rally in October 1905.
We have made a forensic and in-depth study of this extraordinary story. Discover Manchester’s cataclysmic connections…
…read on below.

Further study
In August 1819 at least a dozen people were killed demonstrating for the right to vote at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1903, the Pankhurst family, disgusted with the Independent Labour Party’s refusal to allow women to use the newly-opened Pankhurst Hall in north Manchester, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union to step up the campaign for the right of women to have the vote in parliamentary elections.
What had been a sedate pressure group, willing to stay within the law to change the law, soon became militant. The women suffrage supporters (“suffragettes,” the Daily Mail called them) disrupted a Liberal Party rally in the Free Trade Hall in 1905 and two of their leaders – Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney – were jailed. Manchester had become Suffragette City, but it took a generation and many thousands of broken windows for women to secure the vote.
This is a walk in memory of the Pankhursts – Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia – fierce campaigners, resolute radicals. We visit their haunts, outline their struggle and follow in their footsteps.
An excerpt from the walk
When Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney were arrested for disrupting the Liberal Party’s political rally at the Free Trade Hall in October 1905 they were taken first to a cell in Manchester Town Hall and then to Strangeways Prison.
Soon one of the leading Liberal politicians of the day turned up at the prison offering to pay the women’s fines so that they could be quickly released. The philanthropic politician was none other than Winston Churchill, MP for Oldham, who had recently crossed the floor from the Conservative benches. But was this really a welcome move or just a cynical one? Surely if the women agreed to his offer he could champion himself as being in control of them …

John Rylands Library...And More
2026-05-28 11:30 - 13:15 | Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
Next tour: Thursday 28 May 2026.
Meet: Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, 11.30 a.m.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
The John Rylands Library has been closed for nearly a year. Now it’s back – and with our tours!
***
The only way to truly understand the magic of what is the No. 1 Manchester Attraction on Trip Advisor is on our regular tour.
This is more than a tour of one of the world’s greatest libraries. This is a trip through the industrial and religious history of Manchester linked with the 19th century’s most successful cotton merchant whose legacy survives in the magnificent library named after him.
Tours start with an introduction to the city’s cotton past (at the Royal Exchange) and John Rylands’ religious background (at St Ann’s Church) before we make our way to Deansgate. We then hear:
* An outline of John Rylands Library’s Gothic architecture.
* The story of John and Enriqueta Rylands.
* How the Rylands company became the most successful Manchester cotton merchants of the 19th century.
* An outline of the library’s riches.
* Remarkable pictures of the library’s and the John Rylands firm’s history.
* A look at the oldest piece of the New Testament ever found.
* A close inspection of the exquisite Reading Room.
* An explanation of the key statues, particularly Francis Bacon, who paved the way for the Industrial Revolution during which Manchester thrived, and John Wycliffe and William Tyndale who led a revolution in religion.
*****
The John Rylands Library is often described as “the Taj Mahal of the North-West”, for it is a palace built out of love; a widow’s love for her late husband, a family’s love of religious literature; a city’s love of Gothic architecture. The building looks like a mini-cathedral, a religious icon, a divine presence on Deansgate, but it is one of the world’s greatest libraries, for out of the bequest of John Rylands, Manchester’s richest 19th century cotton magnate, his widow Enriqueta created an unrivalled collection: Dickens’s novels in their original wrappers; a first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets; the second largest collection of works by the pioneering printer William Caxton; the personal papers of John Wesley, John Dalton and Elizabeth Gaskell; later complemented, most remarkably of all, by the 2nd Century St John Fragment – the oldest existing remnant of the New Testament.
The library was built during the 1890s and deliberately placed on Deansgate next to what was then a violent slum (but is now entirely commercialised) to show Manchester’s underclass that there was an alternative. For them and for all users it was and remains free, a haven of man’s pursuit of intellectual brilliance in a harsh industrial climate.
The architect was Basil Champneys whose ecclesiastical touches were toned down by Enriqueta Rylands, a non-conformist. Nevertheless it remains powerfully Gothic – the last Gothic revival building erected in Manchester, which opened on 1 Jan 1900 and was the first Manchester building to be lit by electricity. It was recently restored at great cost with a new grand entrance constructed on the south side.
Highlights of the tour include the St John Fragment and the reading room, a grand galleried Gothic extravaganza filled with stained glass and statuary. The St John Fragment is just that – a fragment – found in Egypt at Oxyrhynchus (Behnesa), the ruined city where some of the most startling and successful excavations in the history of archaeology were carried out. It was donated to the library in 1920 but not identified until 1935 when the papyrus collections were catalogued. The Reading Room is awe-inspiring and overpowering, but the statues come alive when their significance is explained, for here are representations of some of the most formidable figures in British history – Newton, Dalton, Bacon – the links between religion and science, unfashionable at the moment, crucial to the development of civilisation. This is primarily a religious building, a building devoted to religion rather than for worshipping God. Pride of place goes to those figures found here who made Britain the centre of Christian tolerance: John Wycliffe, William Tyndale and John Rainolds.
Tours of the library start with an introduction to the city’s cotton past and John Rylands’ religious background outside St Ann’s Church.

Southern Cemetery
2026-05-29 11:00 - 12:45 | Southern Cemtery, 212 Barlow Moor Road, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, M21 7GL, United Kingdom
Next tour: Friday 29 May 2026, 11 a.m.
Meet: Cemetery Gates (opposite James Hilton Memorials of 245 Barlow Moor Road).(Barlow Moor Road Metrolink stop, 10 minutes walk away).
Please don’t go to: The Crematorium, Nell Lane…
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
***
New Manchester Walks will take you around Southern Cemetery, final resting place of some of the greats of Manchester history, with Ed Glinert, author of “London’s Dead” (published by HarperCollins).
We will see the graves and memories of Matt Busby, John Rylands, Joe Sunlight, Daniel Adamson, Tony Wilson and L. S. Lowry, as we explore Britain’s second biggest cemetery.

50th anniversary of the Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
2026-06-04 18:00 - 19:40 | HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, Select a State:, M15 4GU, United Kingdom
This tour: Thursday 4 June 2026, 6pm.
50th Anniversary of the Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
Meet: Outside HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

Here’s the set list
* Tony Wilson’s pad.
* The Boardwalk, where Oasis made their debut.
* The Hacienda.
* Elbow’s “hole in my neighbourhood”.
* The basement record shop where Morrissey had a job – yes! – for about five minutes, resulting in a depression that inspired those great lines from “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”.
* The Ritz, where the first Smiths gig took place.
* The Hidden Gem church where Tony Wilson’s funeral took place.
* The Free Trade Hall, where this day in 1976 the Sex Pistols invented the modern Manchester music scene.
What does it sound like?
Forget Memphis and Merseybeat, Manchester is music city, a venue to rank alongside New Orleans or Notting Hill, a factory of superior song-making and stirring soundscapes courtesy of Joy Division, the Fall, New Order, Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, John Cooper Clarke, the Stone Roses, 808 State and, of course, the Smiths, all spinning around the legend of the Hacienda, the world’s hippest nightclub, chicer than the Copacabana, sexier than Studio 54, cooler than the Cavern or Cream.
At the centre of the city’s beat was Factory Records, a record label to rival Motown and Chess with a business model that could be compared only to British Leyland or the South Sea Bubble. But it’s not about Mammon or the man, it’s about the music, the songs, and what songs! – “Dead Souls”, “William, It was Really Nothing”, “Rowche Rumble”, “Time Goes By So Slow” – the list, like the road, goes on forever. (Jon the Postman’s versions of “Louie Louie” certainly did).

“Manchester, so much to answer for,” as the man sang.

The Horrors of Angel Meadow. A Tour into the Centre of the Victorian Hell-Hole
2026-06-14 16:30 - 18:10 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
Next tour: Sunday 14 June 2026.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 4.30 p.m.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
“The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy, and most wicked locality in Manchester…full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants and tramps.”
Was this yesterday? No, journalist Angus Bethune Reach was writing in the 19th century when Angel Meadow was one of a number of notorious Manchester slums; probably the worst.
This is what proto-communist Friedrich Engels had to say about the locale in 1844. “The landlords are not ashamed to let dwellings like the six or seven cellars on the quay directly below Scotland Bridge, the floors of which stand at least two feet below the low water level of the Irk … utterly uninhabitable, [it] stands deprived of all fittings for doors and windows, a case by no means rare in this region, when an open ground-floor is used as a privy by the whole neighbourhood for want of other facilities. . . .”
A hundred yards on, at the end of Millow Street, stood “Gibraltar”. This was once described by the social commentator James Phillips Kay as the haunt of the “lowest” of the population. “The stranger, if he dare venture to explore its intricacies and recesses is sure to be watched with suspicion, on every side is heard the sound of the axe or knife…”
Okay, both those revered social commentators were writing many years ago, but go there now and it’s pretty grim, which is why we guide you around these atmospheric areas, converting the squalor and sordidness into scintillating stories. And we’ve not even entered Angel Meadow proper yet.
Have things improved? Yes, with much thanks to the Friends of Angel Meadow. When we’ve finished with all the terrible tales we deserve an ale or two at the Marble pub with its gorgeous tiles, magnificent ales and friendly atmosphere.

The 1996 Manchester Bomb. Expert tour, 30 Years On.
2026-06-15 11:15 | Selfridge’s, Exchange Square, Manchester, M3 1BD, United Kingdom
This tour: Monday 15 June 2026, 11.15am.
Meet: Outside Selfridge’s, Exchange Square.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
One myth we will shatter is that the pillar box that stands on the site now is the same pillar box!
Another myth is that the bomb was definitely the work of the IRA.
The morning of Saturday the 15th of June 1996. A man with an Irish accent phones the Manchester media to say that a bomb is set to go off in the city centre. Because he gives the correct code word, the authorities realise this is serious. The bomb is in a van on Corporation Street by a pillar box outside Marks & Spencer.
The police begin the onerous task of clearing thousands of people from the area. The bomb disposable unit arrives and sets up base on Back Pool Fold, off Cross Street, a hundred yards away. Will they be able to defuse the device in time?
At nearly a quarter past eleven the army people send their remotely-controlled robotic device – the pigstick disrupter – along Cross Street and Corporation Street to defuse the bomb. It arrives at 11.17am, one second too late.
***
The bomb exploded, sending 3,300 pounds of Semtex and ammonium nitrate fertiliser into the sky. It was the biggest ever bomb detonated on the British mainland in “peacetime” and destroyed much of the city centre.
But why Manchester? Join us on a tour tainted with trauma and tension, which reaches into the very depths of the city’s rarely told history.

The Smiths of Manchester Tour (Queen is Dead at 40)
2026-06-16 18:00 - 19:40
Next tour: Tuesday 16 June 2026.
Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

Where we go:
• The Hacienda, vilified in his the Smiths’ most famous song.
• HOME cinema to recall The Smiths’ cinematic links.
• The building where Moz actually had a job!, which inspired…
• Central Station and its role in the Moors Murders that inspired the Smiths’ name.
• The building where the Smiths rehearsed relentlessly in 1983.
• The venue where they made their debut.
• The Lesser Free Trade Hall where Morrissey witnessed a music revolution and earned his first appearance in the media.
and more. Read on…
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They were Britain’s greatest ever group. More melodic than the Beatles, more powerful than the Stones, cleverer than the Who, catchier than U2, funnier than Madness and better-looking than Jesus & Mary Chain (okay, not hard).
They played music that lifted the soul with words that sharpened the mind.
They played both types of music: fast and slow, soft and loud, country and western (???), and they came from Manchester.
They were The Smiths.
They sang about the city and shot its sites for their sleeves: the Hacienda, Manchester Central, “a river the colour of lead”, Coronation Street, the Holy Name Church…
The Smiths’ Manchester walk takes a trip through their haunts and their dark underbelly. Unlike other Smiths’ tours, we don’t shirk from the difficult stories. We explain how the horrendous denouement of the Moors Murderers’ killing spree gave Morrissey the inspiration for the band’s name and affected much of his song-writing.
This is a music-driven tour. We play the relevant song at the relevant stop.

Here’s an extract
Morrissey’s stint in Yanks’ record shop, a dank and now defunct basement outlet in Chepstow Street’s Canada House early in 1979, partly inspired the line about jobs and misery in “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. Yes, he could play records all day, but was still not satisfied. The contradiction of being unhappy with not having a job yet being depressed with job was a long running problem with Moz. As he once noted in his diary: “When I had no job I could pinpoint my depression. But when I did get a job I was still depressed.”
The gestation of the song itself, two minutes-plus of sumptuous sardonic cynicism, was typically Smithsonian. Converting the title of an obscure Sandie Shaw number, “Heaven Knows I’m Missing Him Now”, Morrissey recorded the vocals for the first verse in London. He then insisted on travelling to Manchester to do the vocals for the second verse. Consequently the producer, John Porter, booked a studio, packed the tapes and went North. There Morrissey recorded another verse but then announced he was popping out to the chip shop. 45 minutes later he still hadn’t returned. Porter phoned Moz’s mother who told him, “Oh he was here but he’s gone back to London.”

The Glories of Manchester Architecture
2026-06-26 11:00 - 12:40 | Midland Hotel, 16 Peter Street, Manchester, M60 2DS, United Kingdom
The Glories of Manchester Architecture.
Next tour: Friday 26 June 2026, 11 a.m.
Guide: RIBA judge Ed Glinert, author of “Manchester: The Biography”.
Starts: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

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The Builder magazine once declared “one can scarcely walk about Manchester without coming across frequent examples of the grand in architecture. There is nothing to equal it since the building of Venice.”

Okay, that was written in the 1850s, but for 19th century grandeur Manchester is hard to beat. There are Classical meeting halls and clubs, Italianate cotton palaces, Gothic towers and spires, and Baroque banks – and all of it is stolen, stolen from grand European creations which hopeful architects had sketched on their Grand Tour and then reproduced across the city.
The Gran Guardia Vecchia in Verona provided Edward Walters with a model for the Free Trade Hall; the St Mark’s Campanile in Venice was adapted by Thomas Worthington for the Police Courts on Minshull Street; Ypres Cloth Hall became Manchester Town Hall.
Read on, for the 20th century and beyond…
In the 20th century the new architects adopted a similar approach, but this time it was the gleaming skyscrapers of Chicago and New York that enthused them. However those in charge of Manchester refused to let progressive architects such as Harry S. Fairhurst and Joe Sunlight fill the skyline with granite and glass, and so Manchester missed out on one of the most exciting periods in building history. Restrictions on height eased after the Second World War but Manchester was nervous of reaching for the stars until recently, and it is true to say our towers are poor cousins of the glories that Adrian Smith, Chris Wilkinson and Renzo Piano have been creating across the globe.
We examine the city’s building legacy as we twist in and out of the city centre streets, straining our necks for a glimpse of a glorious Gaudi-like gable, a Venetian vista, a Greek giant order or a stroke of sacred geometry.

***
Want to read more?
Here’s the piece New Manchester Walks’ Ed Glinert wrote for the Manchester International Festival 2011 brochure.
The best view of Manchester’s architecture is from Salford. Stand on isolated, lonely Oldfield Road, off Salford Crescent, by the dried up route of the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, and look west, and there it is: Manchester, caught in a perspective of triumphant towers and soaring skyscrapers. Marvel at the sticking-out “drawers” of the Civil Justice Centre aside its formidable aluminium composite bulk and suspended glass wall, the largest in Europe. Look in awe at the Art Deco fortress of Sunlight House, and take in an intoxicating vision of the Beetham, the subtlety of its shape now suitably sensed when removed by the long gap.
Walk from here into Manchester and the finer detailing of these facades becomes sharper. Central Manchester is dominated by 19th century architects’ desperation to re-create the traditional styles of Europe – Greek, Gothic, Italianate, Baroque – on uncharted territory. Manchester has few original buildings, just brilliant copies. The Memorial Hall on the corner of Albert Square and Southmill Street by Thomas Worthington is pure 15th century Venice. What’s left of the Free Trade Hall on nearby Peter Street is Edward Walters’ take on the Gran Guardia Vecchia in Verona. You want more Italy on the streets of Manchester? Head for the Athenaeum on Princess Street, now part of the art gallery, and behold a Florentine Palace that’s pure Palazzo Pandolfini by Raphael, while inside ironically is a large collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings himself.
On the way, you might head past Friends Meeting House on Mount Street. It’s Greek. Ancient Greek. The façade is based on the Temple on the Ilissus because Richard Lane, designing in the 1820s, believed that as Manchester had no cultural legacy the city should pay homage to the territory where modern ideas of aesthetics, art and architecture were shaped. Not that everybody was impressed with the slew of Classical revival buildings he created. The Builder magazine for instance derided his work (Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall, St Thomas’s Pendleton) as looking like a factories with the front of temples stuck on.
At least in modern times Manchester has begun to originate. The Bruntwood-owned Bank Chambers/Bank House on Faulkner Street, between Piccadilly Gardens and Chinatown, is a magnificent segue of big tower and little tower on a concrete podium. It was designed by Fitzroy, Robinson in 1971 and appropriately is home to Fairhurst’s, the most prolific architects in Manchester history. Pity it will need another hundred years before its brutalist beauty and granite-and-glass glamour are fully appreciated.
