Manchester Walks

John Rylands Library and more...it's back!
2025-07-16 11:15 - 12:45 UTC
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!
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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.
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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.

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.

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

Jewish Manchester: Guided Tour
2025-03-22 13:45 - 15:15 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
“The Old Jewish Ghetto of Manchester”
Next tour: To be re-arranged
Meet: Victoria Station wallmap.
Ends: At the Jewish museum.
Booking:
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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.
The 19th century saw a battle for acceptance. The upwardly mobile Manchester Jews adopted many tenets of established gentile Manchester society – cricket, similar mufti, Gilbert & Sullivan’s light operas – until the peace was shattered by the arrival of refugees fleeing persecution in eastern Europe following the assassination of the Russian Czar, Alexander II in 1881. The new arrival spoke only Yiddish, wore their hair and clothes in a strange wild manner and most certainly didn’t want to fit in.
The established Jews were frightened and believed their hard-fought battle for acceptance would be threatened by these strange figures, and so did everything they could to anglicise them.
The pattern of Jewish migration went north, this way: town (18th century), Red Bank and Strangeways (19th century), Hightown, Crumpsall (early 20th century), Broughton, Prestwich (mid 20th century), Whitefield (post war), And that’s it. No Jew has crossed the Irwell into Radcliffe, like Moses failed to cross the Jordan into the Holy Land. Prosaically there was a huge migration to affluent parts of south Manchester and the suburbs: Didsbury, Bowdon, Hale.
Manchester area Jews have made significant contributions to Manchester society:
* Benjamin Hyam was one of the first tailors to sell ready-to-wear clothes and had a shop on Market Street mid-19th century.
* Chaim Weizmann came to Manchester as a chemist in 1904, spent his time pushing the new creed of Zionism, and convinced the British government to lend their support in what was a remarkable coup, expertly told on the tour.
* Israel Sieff who made Marks & Spencer into one of the country’s most successful retail companies.
* Louis Golding wrote the best novel of Manchester Jewry: Magnolia Street (1932)
* Graham Gouldman ranks as one of the greatest songwriters of the rock era, responsible for the Hollies’ “Bus Stop”, Herman’s Hermits’ “No Milk Today” and the Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul”, before forming 10cc and opening Strawberry Studios in Stockport.
On the tour we also reveal the less-celebrated side of well-known Jewish figures who made a significant contribution to the city, such as Robert Maxwell and Karl Marx. (Ah, but was the latter really Jewish?).

The Ancoats Explorer
2025-03-20 14:30 - 16:15 | Band on the Wall, 25 Swan Street, Manchester, M4 5JZ, United Kingdom
Next tour:
Meet: Band on the Wall, Swan Street.
Booking:
Cost: Free to register. Pay at the end if you think it was worth it.
Large groups: Please contact us to book a separate tour.
Welcome to Ancoats, the cradle of the industrial revolution, a factory hoot from Manchester city centre, now one of the most successfully regenerated areas in Britain. In 1700 the area was a semi-rural enclave by the river Medlock, with Ancoats Hall home to the lords of the Manchester manor. By 1800 it was a teeming, squalid suburb, blackened with soot, the smell of belching smoke hanging in the air.
The conditions were shocking: the noise of thundering machinery, suffocating air, high accident rates and notorious employment practices at the expense of an emaciated, underpaid workforce slave-driven for unsustainably long hours amidst disease, darkness, damp and desperate heat, living in dingy streets of tiny workers’ houses, jerry-built two-up two down brick boxes standing back-to-back so that as many properties as possible could be squeezed into the smallest of spaces.
Child labour was rife.
As one Ancoats mill owner explained to the early 19th century poet laureate Robert Southey, when he visited Manchester in 1808, “You see these children, sir. By the time they are seven or eight years old they are bringing in the money. They come at five in the morning, they leave at six and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.”
This was never a pleasant area, yet some of the mid 19th century buildings, such as the Ice Palace, which we will visit on the walk, were exquisitely detailed with Italianate effects, perfect for the large influx of Italian immigrants, while the earlier mill buildings by the Rochdale Canal, though functional and formal, were palaces of Mammon, monuments to mercantilism, magnificent in their might and mass.
Later experiments in social planning saw some wonderful additions to the locale: the vast Victoria Square, Manchester’s oldest surviving municipal estate, is still an astonishing site. Even more striking is the jazzy Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street, its gorgeous curves of glass and vitrolite the perfect coating for what was then a quality mass market newspaper owned by the formidable Lord Beaverbrook.
The late 20th century saw Ancoats die. The mills shut, the workshops wound down, the canal almost dried up. Now it’s all cleaned up. The mills are modern workshops; the factories smart apartments, while new developments such as the much lauded New Islington project with its funkily named Chips Building and Dutch-styled houses are attracting huge investment.
