Manchester Walks

Manchester Town Hall Tour on Zoom!
2026-02-15 19:00 - 20:15 UTC
Next Zoom tour & exploration: Sunday 15 February 2026, 7pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Meet: On your computer!
Cost: £7.77. No booking fee.
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Manchester Town Hall – the full tour on Zoom!
Yes, while England’s greatest town hall is closed for renovations (reopening 2027), come with us on this ingenious alternative.
Ed Glinert, who has conducted more actual tours of Manchester Town Hall than any other guide and is about to publish a detailed book on the building, will be hosting this virtual Zoom tour.
The format means we can enter every grand reception room, take in the awesomeness of the Great Hall, peruse the Ford Madox Brown murals, descend to the cobbled undercroft, marvel at the Gothic architecture, explain the religious symbolism, identify the statues, monitor the political set-up, recall the fascinating history…and without having to miss out key stops because a meeting room has been booked out.
This offers so much more than was covered in the old tours – and all from the comfort of your own laptop!
* Soon you’ll be able to buy Ed Glinert’s wonderful new book, “Manchester Town Hall: The First 150 Glorious Years”.
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Want to know more?
Manchester’s municipal palace, in all its grand Gothic glory, comes alive with a tour devised by Ed Glinert, author of Penguin’s The Manchester Compendium.
This is the de-luxe tour – from the towering spires on the skyline to the mosaics on the foyer floor; from the flowing cotton tendrils in the state rooms to the ouroborus snake at the entrance; from the missing statue in the empty niche of the Great Hall to the tale of John Wycliffe’s bones defining the fifth Ford Madox Brown mural.

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Manchester Town Hall is the crowning glory of the world’s greatest industrial city, a Gothic Gormenghast of stone statues, soaring spires and religious symbolism crowned with the famous Ford Madox Brown murals.

Our tour takes in everything – the architecture, the portraits, the pictures, the politics, the Order of the Garter crest, the strange animal that guards the entrance, the legend about the Nazis’ love of the building…right up to the thankfully abandoned plans to demolish it.

Our guides are brilliantly informed, wonderfully entertaining and great fun to listen to. We constantly discover new things and unearth unusual angles about the building. We do more than just point out the bleedin’ obvious; we reveal, unveil, cross-reference. We talk about the sacrilegious placing of a cotton boll on top of the church-like tower; the masonic symbolism to show the “true time” on the clock; the coup within the Labour Party that abolished the post of Lord Mayor.

For a fully detailed, definitive, de-luxe Manchester Town Hall tour, this is the only option. Please read to the end for a full and frank preview!

The tour has been devised by Ed Glinert, author of “The Manchester Compendium”, and no one knows the building better than Glinert, the only Manchester tour guide who has been there during all the great Town Hall events of the last 35 years…from the palace coup of 1984, when the position of Lord Mayor was abolished, to the carving of some of the last Freeman of Manchester awards on the council chamber wall.
If you want to understand Manchester Town Hall, be guided around by New Manchester Walks. Yes, this is the de-luxe tour.
A Really Great Review
“Please thank the guide today for a most enjoyable tour.”

It’s wonderful when a customer sends an e-mail with the above praise. And that’s exactly what happened after Sue Grimditch’s Town Hall tour.

“Good Morning. Just letting you know how much I enjoyed the Town Hall Tour yesterday with Sue. It was fabulous – a wonderful experience. Sue was professional, friendly and entertaining – she made the Town Hall come to life and her knowledge was endless. She went beyond what I expected and I can’t wait to go on another one. I have wanted to look round the Town Hall for years but didn’t know there was a guided tour and I couldn’t have wished for a better guide than Sue.
Everyone on the tour was impressed with her knowledge, not only of the Town Hall, but the historic, architectural and political history of Manchester – it was worth every penny.
Well done Sue – and thank you for a most interesting, informative and fun day out. I’m looking at your brochure and already planning my next adventure.”
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You’d like to know more?
Ed Glinert, author of Penguin’s Manchester Compendium and editor of Penguin Classics’ Sherlock Holmes stories, sums up the essence of the building and its history.
Fittingly for a city that prides itself as a municipal power on a scale rivalling the great city-states in European history, Manchester Town Hall is the grandest, greatest and most imposing building in the region.
It was built from 1868-77 to the Gothic designs of Alfred Waterhouse whose plan, one of 136 entries, while not the most handsome and not even the winning entry initially, was the one the judges felt made the best use of light, ventilation and the awkward triangular site available.
The Corporation had given no preference for the building’s architectural style, but to emphasise Manchester’s newly found wealth from textiles Waterhouse chose as his model the 13th century Gothic cloth halls of Flanders. He built in brick faced with stone from the West Yorkshire Spinkwell quarries for the exterior, ashlar for the interior, and placed above the main entrance a 386-foot high clock tower. He also included much statuary on the façade. General Agricola, the Roman who founded Manchester in AD 79, is honoured with a statue over the main doorway. Above him are Henry III and Elizabeth I, and there are also statues of Thomas de la Warre, founder of what is now the Cathedral, and Humphrey Chetham who founded what is now Europe’s oldest library a mile away. Inside the ground floor entrance are busts of the scientists John Dalton, with glassware at his feet, and James Prescott Joule, cross-legged, leaning on an elbow.
Inside the building Waterhouse’s skill becomes apparent. Seven staircases lead up from the ground floor; some grand and imposing, others spiralling mysteriously at the corners of the building. On the first floor are the Lord Mayor’s rooms, the Conference Hall, which contains the original council chamber and contains a huge Gothic chimney-piece, oak screen and wrought-iron galleries where the press and public sat, and the Great Hall, the building’s tour de force, which John Ruskin called “the most truly magnificent Gothic apartment in Europe”. In the panels of the Great Hall’s hammerbeam roof are gilded costs of arms of the nations with which Manchester traded, and on the walls are Ford Madox Brown’s 12 murals which illustrate episodes in Manchester’s history.
The internal courtyard in the basement is often used as a Victorian setting in TV dramas, while throughout the profusion of cloister-like corridors, spiral staircases, bridges and stairwells creates a wonderful sense of drama.
The Town Hall was officially opened on 13 September 1877 with a grand ceremony marred only by the refusal of Queen Victoria to attend. Benjamin Disraeli, the prime minister had to notify the city cryptically that it was “out of the power of Her Majesty to be present on this interesting occasion”. The reasons, undisclosed at the time, were that the Queen was unhappy that the Manchester Corporation had commissioned a statue of the regicide Oliver Cromwell. She was also wary of being seen on the same platform as the one time fiercely radical Manchester mayor, Abel Heywood, who had once been imprisoned for distributing publications which argued for abolishing the monarchy.
Such was Manchester’s penchant for empire building, by the 1920s it considered the Town Hall too small. E. Vincent Harris was duly commissioned to build an extension on an adjacent site to the south, and it is there that the council now meets. Yet ironically when the Corporation commissioned chief surveyor Rowland Nicholas to draw up the Manchester Plan of 1945 in rebuilding the city after the Second World War, he decided the main Town Hall was now too big, and suggested it be replaced at excessive cost with a streamlined modernist replacement. Fortunately for Manchester his proposals were shelved.

The Seven Wonders of Manchester
2026-02-11 11:00 - 13:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
What was the world’s biggest trading room, masterpieces of religious art, Europe’s oldest library, the city’s cathedral and a celebration of Manchester’s greatest gift to the world – Work.
These are some of the wonders of Manchester, the world’s first industrial city, capital of the North.
• Chetham’s, the oldest library in Europe built into the 15th century Tudor buildings in the heart of mediaeval Manchester.
• The Trinity painting inside Manchester Cathedral, honouring the church’s three saints.
• The Royal Exchange: once the world’s biggest trading floor, now home to a futurist-looking and world-renowned theatre.
• The stained glass inside St Ann’s Church with its Masonic and Kabbalist connections.
• The extraordinary Stations of the Cross paintings in St Mary the Hidden Gem, the oldest post-Reformation Catholic church in the country.
• A glorious representation of the full city coat of arms, complete with its religious symbolsim and slave ship.
• Ford Madox Brown’s monumental painting Work inside Manchester Art Gallery. This is Manchester’s greatest work of art, explained, outlined, resolved in wondrous detail.
• The vintage Rolls Royce outside the Midland Hotel. What on earth is it doing there?
And we will finish in an eighth wonder for much-needed refreshments.

Christmas Day this year
2025-12-25

Political Manchester: private student tour
2025-12-03 17:00 - 19:00

Marx & Engels: private student tour
2025-12-03 11:00 - 13:00

On the Trail of Marx & Engels in Manchester
2025-11-30 12:00 - 14:00 | Engels Statue, First Street, Gaythorn, Manchester, M15 4GU, United Kingdom
Next tour: Sunday 30 November 2025
(In honour of Friedrich Engels’s birthday)
Meet: Friedrich Engels Statue, outside HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Gaythorn, 12 noon.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
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Follow in the footsteps of Karl Marx, inventor of that phenomenally popular political system – communism – and Friedrich Engels, the German cotton merchant and secret revolutionary who spent his working life in Manchester making capitalist money so that he could live the life of a bourgeois, riding with the Cheshire Hunt at the weekends, but researching social conditions in the Manchester slums to write one of the most influential political books ever written, The Condition of the Working Class in England, in 1845.
Hugely entertaining, informative and intriguing, this tour has been devised by Ed Glinert, author of Penguin’s The Manchester Compendium and many other tomes published by the cream of British publishers, who has been hacking away at the coal-face of local politics for 35 years, including a stint at the heart of one of the most sinister Trotskyite cells Hulme ever witnessed.

Ed Glinert giving talk on Jack the Ripper
2025-11-11

Chilling Tales from the Manchester Graveyards (on Hallowe'en)
2025-10-31 18:00 - 20:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
Next walking tour: Friday 31 October 2025 (Hallowe’en).
Meet: Victoria Station Wallmap, 6pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Enter, if you dare, a nether world of murder, assassination, hanging, homicide, regicide, talking corpses and some really nasty stuff.
There are lot of unexplained deaths on this tour, as well as the odd decapitation, hanging and being buried alive. There are tragic deaths and accidental deaths. Hoax deaths and bloody deaths. Death by hanging, death by shooting and sudden death. Instant death. Slow, tortuous death. Those who didn’t die and those who should have died.
These are gruesome, ghastly and ghostly stories, especially when they involve those who weren’t supposed to be dead. Take the case of Manchester man John Beswick. He woke up some time in 1750 to find himself in a confined space, and then realised it was his own coffin. He banged on the roof and was rather relieved to find a crowd of people on the other side ready to release him. They were the mourners at his funeral. He wasn’t dead, just very tired.
His sister, Hannah, was so mortified of being similarly buried alive she asked a local doctor, Charles White, to check her corpse regularly once she had expired. In return she made a hefty donation to Dr White’s new infirmary, what is now the MRI in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Once looked as if Hannah had expired the doctor made sure by pickling her in vinegar and stuffing the body into a grandfather clock in her own house in east Manchester where the servants could check on her every day. Hannah Beswick remains dead.
This is just one of many deathly stories we’ve dug up and revived for this chilling tour with the equally frightening Ed Glinert.
It’s a grave night out!

Manchester & the Pre-Raphaelites (private tour)
2025-10-29 11:15 - 13:00

Alan Turing's Manchester (in conjunction with HOME Theatre's Breaking the Code
2025-10-25 15:00 - 16:30 | Manchester Museum, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom
Next walking tour: Saturday, the 25th of October 2025.
Meeting Place: Manchester Museum entrance, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, 3pm.
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.
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• 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

Charles Dickens in Manchester. Official Literary Festival Tours
2025-10-18 14:30 - 16:30 | Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens, United Kingdom
Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025, during the Manchester Literature Festival.
Meet: By the Queen Victoria statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 2.30pm.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Private bookings: To book privately, please phone Ed Glinert on 07769 29 8068.
What a review on TripAdvisor!
I booked myself and some Irish/Canadian visitors on a special Charles Dickens’s Manchester tour to coincide with the Manchester Literary Festival. It was a superb way to get new insights into some familiar parts of the city and to discover fascinating facts about places that I have often walked past without appreciating their historic and cultural significance. Ed Glinert, our tour guide and author of “The Manchester Compendium” (also highly recommended, available on amazon), was excellent. His selection of essential and quirky details, delivered with dry wit in an east London accent, were spot on. I was a student in Manchester in the 1980s and have family there so I now visit the city every month. The tour made me realise how much there is still to discover about the place and it was great to see how much my visitors, on their first trip to the city, enjoyed finding out about the place. I will definitely do more of New Manchester Walks tours and would highly recommend them.
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It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
Manchester in the early Victorian period was the commercial heart of the North-West, the industrial heart of the world’s greatest empire, a city of culture, power and glory, a city alive with the greatest figures of the age: Wellington and Peel, Disraeli and Gladstone, Tennyson and of course Charles Dickens.

Britain’s most celebrated novelist came to the growing industrial metropolis of Manchester 19 times, taking the platform at a fund-raiser in October 1843 for the Athenaeum alongside such reformers and notables as Benjamin Disraeli and Richard Cobden; partying with his pal and fellow novelist Harrison Ainsworth; and visiting his sister in then desirable Ardwick.
He based the character of the crippled Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol on the son of a friend who owned an Ardwick cotton mill. Local industrialists the Grant Brothers, William and Daniel, were the prototypes for the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby.
Yet Dickens produced only one work on the Industrial Revolution – Hard Times (1854). The novel is set in a mythical Coketown, possibly Manchester but also based on Preston. Though not one of his better works, it is worth reading for its descriptions of working-class life.
He also spoke at and acted in the Free Trade Hall and was the guest of honour at the opening of the Free Library in 1852.
We will visit the haunts of those he met and knew, stop by at the locations he might just recognise today, and drop into the elegant Portico Library where the catalogue in the 1840s was organised by his friend James Crossley.
Until then, sample this specimen from Hard Times:
The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily. Stokers emerged from low underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals.
The whole town seemed to be frying in oil. There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere. The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed and trickled it. The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled languidly in the desert. But no temperature made the melancholy mad elephants more mad or more sane. Their wearisome heads went up and down at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair weather and foul. The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods; while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round, from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and wheels.

Manchester & Slavery (on International Anti-Slavery Day)
2025-10-18 11:00 - 13:00 | Victoria Station Wallmap, Victoria Station Approach, Manchester, M99 1ZW, United Kingdom
Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025 (International Anti-Slavery Day)
Starts: 11am from Victoria Station wallmap.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

Manchester has hit the news big style! Simon Hattenstone in the the Guardian has “discovered” that the ship on the City of Manchester coat of arms is a slave ship. According to Hattenstone, not just the city but the local football clubs should drop this “symbol of slavery shame” from their crests. Hattenstone quoted Jonathan Schofield who with his usual inability to research properly told Hattenstone that it wasn’t a slave ship.
Well the ship on the Manchester coat of arms IS a slave ship and Ed Glinert has discovered which ship it was, chosen for the coat of arms in 1838 when Manchester became a borough, able to run its own affairs for the first time as opposed to being at the whim of the absentee landlords, the Mosley family.
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Manchester might have prospered from the horrors of slavery for much of the 18th century, but the growing town was soon leading the campaign for its abolition.
The turning point was a meeting held at the Manchester Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) on 28 October 1787 fronted by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. “When I went into the church,” Clarkson recalled, “it was so full that I could scarcely get to my place; for notice had been publicly given, though I knew nothing of it, that such a discourse would be delivered. I was surprised also to find a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit. There might be forty or fifty of them. The text that I took, as the best to be found in such a hurry, was the following: ‘Thou shalt not oppress a stranger, for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt’”.
Manchester amassed the biggest number of signatures for the petition against slavery that went before Parliament. Sadly the petition was destroyed when the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834.
While America continued to promote the system in the 19th century, Manchester led the move for Stateside abolition even though most of the raw cotton that fuelled the Manchester economy was picked by slaves in the Deep South.
This tour cuts straight to the heart of one of the most controversial and disturbing social systems ever devised. We hear how Manchester families such as the Heywoods and Gregs who benefited from slavery became its biggest opponents. We explain how the “Slavery Triangle” (Lancashire-America-Africa-Lancashire…) kept the system going, relate the stories of the escaped slaves such as Henry “Box” Brown, who once posted himself in a box from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia and who visited Manchester, and discuss how leading 19th century local Liberals such as John Bright and Richard Cobden not only kept the anti-slavery campaign flourishing but were even in contact with Abraham Lincoln.
At the Town Hall we hear about the ground-breaking 5th Pan-African Congress of 1945 which catalysed the post-war push for independence. At the Free Trade Hall we hear about the visits of Paul Robeson and how he was barred from leaving America in the 1950s. We finish the tour at the Abraham Lincoln statue in Lincoln Square, naturally.

Manchester Literature Festival Tours – Elizabeth Gaskell
2025-10-16 11:00 - 13:30 | Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann Street, Manchester, United Kingdom
Next Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester walking tour:
Manchester Literature Festival Official Tours, Thursday 16 October 2025.
Meet: St Ann’s Church, St Ann’s Square, 11am.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
Join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and tour guide, a Penguin Classics editor and much-published author, on this tribute tour to one of Manchester’s greatest writers.
How this walk works
* A simple walk around Gaskellian sights and sites in the city centre.
* A trip up to the Portico Library where the Rev William Gaskell was chairman for 35 years.
* A bus trip to Chorlton-on-Medlock and very interesting Dover Street, once home to the Gaskells.
* A short walk to the excellent museum that is the Elizabeth Gaskell House.
The story so far:
Elizabeth Gaskell was born Elizabeth Stevenson in Chelsea and raised in Knutsford. She worked in Manchester, combating poverty and ignorance, spreading the word about non-conformist Christianity and devising fiendish literary plots.
Gaskell wrote about love: “He could not forget the touch of her arms around his neck, impatiently felt as it had been at the time; but now the recollection of her clinging defence of him, seemed to thrill him through and through—to melt away every resolution, all power of self-control, as if it were wax before a fire.”
She wrote about Manchester cotton: “As they drove through the larger and wider streets, from the station to the hotel, they had to stop constantly; great loaded lorries blocked up the not over-wide thoroughfares… Every van, every wagon and truck, bore cotton, either in the raw shape in bags, or the woven shape in bales of calico.”
She also wrote about smoke and Manchester: “They had taken Franky there to show him Manchester, far away in the blue plain against which the woodland foreground cut with a soft clear line. Far, far away in the distance on that flat plain, you might see the motionless cloud of smoke hanging over a great town, and that was Manchester − ugly, smoky Manchester, dear, busy, earnest, noble-working Manchester; where their children had been born, and where, perhaps, some lay buried; where their homes were, and where God had cast their lives; and told them to work out their destiny.”

Elizabeth Gaskell made her name with the novel Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life even though it was published anonymously in 1848. It covered topics that shocked the shock city – Chartism, murder, hypocrisy, corruption. Cranford (1853) and North & South (1855) cemented her reputation.
Mrs Gaskell was exasperated by the city: “How deep might be the romance in the lives of some of those who elbowed me daily in the busy streets of the town in which I resided,” she sighed. “I had always felt a deep sympathy with the careworn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want.”
But this was where she became a revered literary figure − more than just the wife of the minister at the Unitarian chapel; a scion of Dickens, a chronicler supreme.

Manchester Architecture at Night
2025-10-02 18:30 - 20:00 | 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.

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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.

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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!

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.

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.
