Manchester Walks

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

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

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

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

The Glories of Manchester Architecture
2026-04-02 14:30 - 16:15 | Midland Hotel, 16 Peter Street, Manchester, M60 2DS, United Kingdom
The Glories of Manchester Architecture.
Next tour: Thursday 2 April 2026, 2.30pm.
Guide: RIBA judge Ed Glinert, author of “Manchester: The Biography”.
Starts: Outside the Midland Hotel, Peter Street.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.

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

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

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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.

The Grand Canals of Manchester
2026-04-11 14:30 - 16:30 | Outside the Malmaison Hotel, 1-3 Piccadilly, Manchester
* Next tour: Saturday the 11th of April 2026, 2.30pm.
* Meet: outside the Malmaison Hotel, 1-3 Piccadilly.
* Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
“Streets full of water. Please advise.”
Surely Mark Twain was reporting back from Manchester, not Venice, for the city is a font of watery ways and walks? Built during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, the Rochdale Canal, the Ashton Canal and their tributaries brought coal and cotton to central Manchester, and took away manufactured goods to be sent around the world. Then the work stopped and the canals silted up, but over the last fifty years the canals have been wonderfully restored.
Join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian, for a celebratory saunter along the great waterways.
This is a spectacular stroll along the waterways of Manchester, invoking a host of stories industrial and architectural, anecdotal and incidental, as we head west from Piccadilly, along the canals under the city streets towards Britain’s grand canal junction at Castlefield where four waterways cross.
We’ve changed the route for this tour to take in the city centre and Ancoats.

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

50th anniversary of the Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
2026-06-04 18:00 - 19:40 | HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester, Select a State:, M15 4GU, United Kingdom
Official Manchester Music Tours

The tours have been organised by Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and long-time music writer, co-author of Fodor’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Traveller books, and launch production editor for Mojo.
This tour: 50th anniversary of the Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall
Thursday 4 June 2026, 5.30pm.
Meet: Outside HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite
A one-off special to celebrate the 50th anniversary to the day of the Sex Pistols’ playing at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall…the gig that created the city’s modern music scene.
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Here’s the set list
* Tony Wilson’s pad.
* The Boardwalk, where Oasis made their debut.
* The Hacienda.
* Elbow’s “hole in my neighbourhood”.
* The Free Trade Hall, where Bob Dylan was booed and the Sex Pistols invented the modern Manchester music scene.
* The basement record shop where Morrissey had a job – yes! – for about five minutes, resulting in a depression that inspired those great lines from “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”.
* The Ritz, where the first Smiths gig took place.
* The Hidden Gem church where Tony Wilson’s funeral took place.
What does it sound like?
Forget Memphis and Merseybeat, Manchester is music city, a venue to rank alongside New Orleans or Notting Hill, a factory of superior song-making and stirring soundscapes courtesy of Joy Division, the Fall, New Order, Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, John Cooper Clarke, the Stone Roses, 808 State and, of course, the Smiths, all spinning around the legend of the Hacienda, the world’s hippest nightclub, chicer than the Copacabana, sexier than Studio 54, cooler than the Cavern or Cream.
At the centre of the city’s beat was Factory Records, a record label to rival Motown and Chess with a business model that could be compared only to British Leyland or the South Sea Bubble. But it’s not about Mammon or the man, it’s about the music, the songs, and what songs! – “Dead Souls”, “William, It was Really Nothing”, “Rowche Rumble”, “Time Goes By So Slow” – the list, like the road, goes on forever. (Jon the Postman’s versions of “Louie Louie” certainly did).

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