Manchester Walks

Manchester Architecture at Night
2025-10-02 18:30 - 20:00 UTC | Midland Hotel, 16 Peter Street, Manchester, M60 2DS, United Kingdom
The Glories of Manchester Architecture
Next tour (Manchester Buildings at Night): Thursday 2 October 2025.
Guide: RIBA judge Ed Glinert.
Starts: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street, 6.30pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

***

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.

Literary & Philosophical Manchester (private tour for the Lit & Phil)
2025-09-25 18:00 - 20:00

10 Manchester Inventions That Shook the World. Expert Tour
2025-09-25 14:00 - 16:00 | Science & Industry Museum, Lower Byrom Street, Campfield, Manchester
Next tour, Thursday 25 September 2025, 2pm.
Meet: Outside the Science & Industry Museum on Lower Byrom Street, Campfield.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Manchester invented the modern world, for this was the first city of the industrial revolution, and its inhabitants have given society some of its greatest creations. These are the ones we detail on this most inventive of walks (in chronological order).
1. John Kay’s Fly Shuttle, 1733
Crucial to the development of the cotton industry, in which Manchester led the world from the late 18th century until the Second World War, was this simple machine.
Before John Kay’s Fly Shuttle, workers threw the shuttle with their hands. A couple of weavers were needed at the loom, throwing the shuttle, one to the other. Now it could be done by one person. Those thrown out of work often joined the machine-breakers – the infamous Luddites – as depicted in the 10th Mural inside the Town Hall.
• Kay fought for copyright in the courts but wasn’t successful. He died in France ruined.

2. Britain’s 1st canal – the Bridgewater, 1761
Britain’s first man-made waterway, with a route independent of rivers, was financed by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who needed to find a way of reducing flooding in his Worsley mine. The Duke’s engineer, James Brindley, and his land agent, John Gilbert, proposed letting the water be channeled and the coal taken out along with it. The Duke soon realised he had enough coal to supply the needs of local towns, and the most important local town was Manchester. He then built a canal across the land so that his supply could reach the growing town.
3. Atomic Theory, 1803
John Dalton presented a paper to the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society on 21 October 1803 which proposed that all matter is composed of atoms, that chemical reactions occur when atoms are rearranged and that compounds are formed from atoms of the constituent elements. Atomic Theory changed the face of science and ranks as the first instance of a Manchester event having worldwide conclusions.
4. Vegetarianism, 1809
William Cowherd, a curate at St John’s off Deansgate in the 1790s left to set up a church in Salford where he preached that people should “eat no more meat till the world endeth”, citing Genesis 9:3 as proof that God wanted man to refrain from eating meat. It catalysed a new world-wide movement in abstaining from meat.
5. First Passenger Railway, 1830
The Manchester-Liverpool Railway was the first passenger line in the world as well as the first with two tracks, timetables and stations. The Manchester terminus, Liverpool Road, survives as part of the Museum of Science & Industry.

6. The First Submarine, 1878
The Rev George Garrett, a Moss Side vicar, founded the Submarine Navigation and Pneumataphore company at 56 Deansgate in 1878. His vessel, Resurgam, the first ever military submarine, was devised in his office in 1878. Not being too near the sea, Garrett’s team went to the Wirral to test his invention. Resurgam I was a 14ft, one-man vessel nicknamed “the curate’s egg”. Resurgam II, built in Birkenhead in 1879 sunk near Rhyl. The wreck was discovered in 1995.
7. Competitive Football, 1888
William McGregor, a Scottish draper, devised an ingenious new means of testing the best football teams in 1888. Each club would play each other twice, home and away, during one year. Thus was born the Football League, the game’s first real test of a competition, the forerunner of today’s multi-million pound Premiership, at a meeting at the Royal Hotel, Manchester, on 17 April 1888.
8. Rolls Royce, 1904
Frederick Henry Royce, a local engineer, met Charles Stewart Rolls, a wealthy London playboy, in Manchester, but NOT at the Midland Hotel in 1904. Rolls had broken the world speed record in 1903, going an astonishing 93 mph only a few years after the police had warned him not to drive at more than 4mph! They soon formed Rolls-Royce, making luxury cars in Hulme, two miles away.
9. The 1st Programmable Computer, 1948
Tom Kilburn and Fred Williams built a machine out of war surplus materials that could perform calculations from a stored program – what is now recognised as the first computer, “Baby”. They first used it on 21 June 1948, running a program written by Tom Kilburn, the world’s first computer programme and the only one he ever wrote.

10. Graphene, 2004
The world’s thinnest material, one atom thick, soon to revolutionise computer screens and electronic technology, was created by two Manchester University scientists, Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim, in 2004.

Just the latest of a series of Manchester inventions that shook the world!

Manchester in 12 Songs (Guided Tour with Music)
2025-09-20 12:00 - 14:00 | Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street, Manchester, M2 1NL, United Kingdom
As Ian Curtis sang: “I’ve been waiting for a guide…”
Next tour: Sat 20 September 2025.
Meet: outside the Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street M2 1NL, 12 n00n.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Private tour: Please contact New Manchester Walks
The sounds of the city, courtesy of the Smiths, the Fall, Elbow, Joy Division, Bob Dylan, John Cooper Clarke…
We will walk in search of the stories that chime with the sounds that have made Manchester one of the world’s greatest music centres.
New Manchester Walks has picked 10 stone cold classics which link with city centre landmarks and can tell an enthralling story.
Along the way we will stop at Canada House where Morrissey once had a proper job, as recalled in “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. We will stop at the Hidden Gem church where Tony Wilson’s funeral service was held. Part of the soundtrack emanating from the Rhenish stones that tragic day was Joy Division’s “Atmosphere”.
As for the other songs, you’ll have to come on the walk…

Stand Up To Racism Manchester! Guided Tour CANCELLED. NO INTEREST
2025-09-15 11:30 - 13:30 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
Date: Monday 15 September 2025.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 11.30am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Manchester has long been one of the world’s most welcoming cities, accepting and assimilating those from Ireland, Italy, Russia, the West Indies and more over the centuries. But it hasn’t alaways been a smooth journey. Many have faced hostility and discrimination before finding status.
Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and tour guide, author of the forthcoming “Manchester: The Biography” with Great Northern Books, leads this tour into one of the city’s most fascinating set of stories…featuring Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Clarkson, Paul Robeson, George Fox, Sylvia Pankhurst and Jomo Kenyatta, in opposition to John Gladstone, Nick Griffin and James Anderton.

Tour the Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester
2025-09-14 12:00 - 14:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
“The Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester”
This tour: Sunday 14 September 2025.
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 12 noon.
Ends: At the Jewish museum.
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.

Ed Glinert speaking on Liverpool Architecture for Wilmslow Arts Society
2025-09-11 19:30 - 20:30

The Great Art Treasures of Manchester POSTPONED
2025-09-03 11:15 - 13:00 | Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
Next tour: Wednesday 3 September 2025
Meet: outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann’s Square.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Manchester Art Gallery is home to Britain’s greatest collection of Pre-Raphaelite works, and in the streets beyond L. S. Lowry, Adolphe Valette and even William Morris have left their signature. Join us as we unearth the masterpieces of Manchester art.

Ed Glinert researching, and no other guide wants to do any tours!
2025-08-17 - 2025-08-27

"Fame Is the Spur". Tour Manchester's Greatest Novel
2025-08-16 14:30 - 16:15 | Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester
* This annual tour takes place on Peterloo Day: 16 August.
NOT 2025
* Tour led by Ed Glinert, a Penguin Classics editor, and Manchester’s leading historian and tour guide.
* Meet outside Manchester Central Library, St Peter’s Square, 2.30pm.
* Must be booked on Eventbrite by pressing here.
***
Howard Spring’s Fame Is The Spur is the great Manchester novel. It is also the great Peterloo novel and the great Suffragette novel. An astonishing achievement.
John Hamer Shawcross grows up, illegitimate, in poverty in Victorian Ancoats. At the start of the novel the elderly lodger in his house shows the young Hamer a sabre he wrenched from a soldier who had used it to kill his girlfriend at Peterloo. Hamer inherits the sword.
Bookish and inquisitive, he is destined not to go to work in a mill. He goes abroad to find himself, in classic bildungsroman fashion, and comes back bursting with braggadocio and a heightened sense of burning injustice. He becomes a firebrand orator within the burgeoning labour movement, brandishing the sabre to cut his way through politics. As he climbs the slippery pole so he sells out his principles, Kinnock style, or actually in the manner of the contemporaneous Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, back in the 1920s. Spring had to wait until MacDonald had died before the novel could be published, otherwise the ex-PM would have sued his ass.
Fame Is The Spur is just one of a series of entertaining Manchester-based novels Howard Spring he wrote once he had left the Manchester Guardian to become a London journalist.
Ed Glinert uses his metaphorical sabre to cut a path through Howard Spring’s Manchester.

Peterloo Massacre: Official Tour on the Day
2025-08-16 11:00 - 12:45 | Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester
Peterloo tours on the day:
Saturday 16 August (Peterloo Day) 2025, 11am.
Meet: outside Central Library, St Peter’s Square.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
These unique Peterloo tours have been devised by Ed Glinert, Penguin author and compiler of the forthcoming epic work, Manchester: The Biography, who has conducted enormous amounts of recent research into the entire Peterloo story (with many thanks to Mike Herbert’s and Robert Poole’s invaluable expertise).
Manchester tour guide Ed Glinert has worked with both the campaigning journalist extraordinaire Paul Foot (author of Red Shelley) and Mike Leigh, director of the Peterloo film.
* Read on:

The Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819 is the most dramatic incident in English political history. Sabre-wielding troops charged 60,000 Mancunians at a rally called to lower the price of bread and demand the vote. More than a dozen people died and some 650 were injured.
The first few decades of the 19th century, enshrined in public imagination as the elegant age of the Regency, were a time of severe political repression in England. The Tory government, led by Lord Liverpool, feared that the kind of revolutionary activity recently witnessed in France would break out in England – probably in Manchester, where social conditions were so desperate – and chose decided to stamp out all dissent and free speech.
The government was at war with France, which saw Wellington triumph over Napoleon’s forces at Waterloo in 1815.
But as Paul Foot once wrote, the British government was also waging war against its own people.
This guided tour, visiting the site of St Peter’s Field in Manchester city centre where the Peterloo Massacre took place, has been devised by Ed Glinert, political commentator with 40 years’ experience for various leading newspapers, magazines and publishers, who worked with legendary left-wing political journalist Paul Foot at Private Eye combating injustice.
Glinert, who has researched the story for decades, brings his unique touch to this chilling story, going into extraordinary detail, explaining the build-up to the events, the violence of the day, 16 August 1819, and the dreadful aftermath, introducing related events, themes and people: Shelley’s powerful poem, The Masque of Anarchy; the birth of the Manchester Guardian; the Cato Street Conspiracy; the Six Acts; Tom Paine and his bones – even Anthony Burgess.

Tony Wilson's Manchester
2025-08-10 12:00 - 14:00 | HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, Select a State:, M15 4GU, United Kingdom
Tony Wilson’s Manchester: Sunday 10 August 2025.
Anniversary of the day he died in 2007.

Meet: outside HOME, 12 noon.

Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
***
Tony Wilson never wrote a song, sang one or played an instrument. Yet he created the modern Manchester music scene. He made things happen; he cajoled people into doing important things. He harried, encouraged, pushed, promoted. It might be fair to say without him Manchester’s music history might have stopped with Sad Café.
On the day Wilson died, 10 August (2007), we honour one of the most popular figures in recent Manchester history: a vainglorious, proud, arrogant, infuriating but genius impresario.
We will visit the Hacienda, which he swore “must be built”; Rafter’s (now Tesco’s – fab!), where he met Ian Curtis (imagine a universe without Unknown Pleasures and Closer…no!); the Hidden Gem where he made his last confession to an astonished priest; and the site of Granada Television, now revamped into the Factory arts centre, named after his record label, where he preened and pontificated.
The Hacienda went bust. Factory Records went bust. Granada TV has been abolished, but as Wilson was fond of saying “we made history, not money.” Factory Records’ designer Peter Saville explained: “Tony created a new understanding of Manchester; the resonance of Factory goes way beyond the music. Young people often dream of going to another place to achieve their goals. Tony provided the catalyst and context for Mancunians to do that without having to go anywhere.”

John Rylands Library and More...
2025-08-07 11:15 - 13:00 | Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
This tour: Thursday 7 August, 11.15 a.m.
Meet: Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street.
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.

The Castlefield Explorer
2025-07-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4LQ, United Kingdom
Next tour: The Castlefield Explorer, Sunday 27 July 2025, 12 noon.
Meet: Beetham Tower Entrance on Deansgate.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Castlefield is not only the Roman birthplace of Manchester, it was also the industrial birthplace of the city in the 18th century, and one of the most important historical sites in the world as it is the home of the world’s oldest railway station and Britain’s first canal.
The lesser known history is also eye-opening. Here can be found Manchester’s last authentic Roman relic (below), a surviving Victorian hut from where people could emigrate to America, stupendous railway viaducts, secluded waterways, quaint cobbles, the most sprawling of museums and a graveyard full of surprises.

Bridgewater Canal – Annual Celebration Tour
2025-07-26 14:30 | Beetham Tower, 301 Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4LQ, United Kingdom
Next tour: Saturday 26 July 2025.
Meet: entrance Beetham Tower, Deansgate, 2.30pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Evenbrite.
About the tour
Join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading canal historian, to explore the waters, banks and history of the Bridgewater Canal, Britain’s first man-made waterway, which saw Manchester launch the industrial revolution in the 1760s.
The tour begins in Manchester city centre, near the canal’s terminus, so that we can traverse in detail the delta-like tributaries that weave through Castlefield, such as Potato Wharf and the Staffordshire Basin. We can also visit the ingenious Giant’s Basin weir and watch how the canal links with the River Medlock it subjugated. From the remarkable crossroads of waterways at the Castlefield Canal Basin we head off to Hulme Locks, which allowed the Bridgewater Canal to link to the River Irwell. At Cornbrook there are traces of the original Corn Brook in a magnificent drain and at Pomona the modern lock that connects to the Manchester Ship Canal. We finish the tour with a visual surprise.
History of the Bridgewater Canal
The canal opened on the 17th of July 1761. It was devised by Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, who in looking for a way of reducing flooding in his Worsley mines turned to his engineer, James Brindley. They developed a way of channeling the water so that the coal could be taken out on boats. When the Duke realised he had enough coal to supply the needs of Manchester and Salford he decided to build a canal across the land so that his supply could reach those towns.
Work on the new canal began in 1758. There were no locks. Once the canal opened, it became much cheaper to transport coal to Manchester. The price of coal dropped and new industries using that coal began to flourish alongside the water. The original 1761 route went from the Duke of Bridgewater’s Worsley coal mines to the River Irwell at Barton. There it crossed the waterway, now the Manchester Ship Canal, on an aqueduct that was one of the wonders of the age, but has since been replaced with an equally ingenious structure. By the end of 1761 the canal had been extended to Cornbrook, and in 1765 it reached Castlefield where Brindley culverted the river Medlock.
Once a year in celebration we walk along the canal (not the entire route, that would take weeks!) to relate the great stories about the canal. And what stories! When Brindley first announced he intended taking the canal 38 feet over the river on an aqueduct held up by three sandstone arches he was greeted with incredulity. The Duke himself muttered: “I have often heard of castles in the air, but never before saw where any of them was to be erected”.
To prove how the aqueduct would work at the parliamentary hearing Brindley unwrapped a large cheese which he carved out till it resembled his planned design. He then explained that he would make the aqueduct watertight using clay-puddling – placing several layers of clay, sand and water on the floor of the waterway – demonstrating the idea in front of MPs with buckets of water and wet clay. Indeed so fond was Brindley of the system, his dying words were “puddle it, puddle it”.

John Rylands Library and more...it's back!
2025-07-16 11:15 - 12:45
Next tour: Wednesday 16 July, 11.15 a.m.
Meet: Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street.
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.

MIF Tours - Secret Manchester
2025-07-13 12:00 - 14:00 | Mercure Hotel (outside), Portland Street, Manchester, M1 4PH, United Kingdom
Next tour: Sunday the 13th of June 2025, 12 noon.
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.

Manchester Music (private tour)
2025-07-09 11:00 - 13:00 | HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, Select a State:, M15 4GU, United Kingdom

MIF Tours – The Glories of Manchester Architecture
2025-07-04 08:00 - 17:00
NEXT TOUR

The Glories of Manchester Architecture: Tuesday 8 July 2025.
Guide: RIBA judge Ed Glinert.
Starts: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street, 12 noon.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
***

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.

L. S, Lowry: Expert Tour with Pictures
2025-06-21 14:30 - 16:00 | Mercure Hotel (outside), Portland Street, Manchester, M1 4PH, United Kingdom
Next Walking tour: Saturday 21 June 2025
Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Spurned, snubbed and sniggered at, Laurence Stephen Lowry became Britain’s most famous and best-loved 20th century painter, whose works now sell for millions.
He called himself a “simple man”, but he was the strangest of fellows. He never left the British Isles, enjoyed no sexual relations, and made his will over to a much younger woman, whom he befriended simply because she shared his surname.
Lowry’s day job was not as an artist but a rent collector in the slum areas of the city, and as we explore the man behind the paintings we take you through the haunts he visited and depicted.

Alan Turing's Manchester: Expert Tour
2025-06-21 11:30 - 13:00 | Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Next free walking tour: Saturday the 21st of June 2025, 11.30 a.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

The 1996 Manchester Bomb. Expert tour
2025-06-15 11:15 - 12:30 | Selfridge’s, Exchange Square, Manchester, M3 1BD, United Kingdom
This tour: Sunday 15 June 2025, 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.

Ed Glinert talk to Halifax Arts Society, Liverpool Architecture
2025-06-10 13:00 - 14:00
