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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251002T183000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251002T200000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250831T093656Z
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SUMMARY:Manchester Architecture at Night
DESCRIPTION:The Glories of Manchester Architecture\nNext tour (Manchester Buildings at Night): Thursday 2 October 2025.\nGuide: RIBA judge Ed Glinert.\nStarts: Outside the Midland Hotel\, Peter Street\, 6.30pm.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n*** \n\n\n\n\n\n\nThe 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.” \n\n\n\n\n\n\nOkay\, 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. \nThe 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. \nRead on\, for the 20th century and beyond…\nIn 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. \nWe 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. \n \n\n \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n*** \nWant to read more?\nHere’s the piece New Manchester Walks’ Ed Glinert wrote for the Manchester International Festival 2011 brochure. \nThe 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. \nWalk 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. \nOn 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. \nAt 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.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/manchester-architecture-at-night/
LOCATION:Midland Hotel\, 16 Peter Street\, Manchester\, M60 2DS\, United Kingdom
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251016T110000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251016T133000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250905T113751Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250905T113751Z
UID:26417-1760612400-1760621400@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Manchester Literature Festival Tours – Elizabeth Gaskell
DESCRIPTION:Next Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester walking tour:\nManchester Literature Festival Official Tours\, Thursday 16 October 2025.\nMeet: St Ann’s Church\, St Ann’s Square\, 11am.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \nJoin 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. \nHow this walk works\n* A simple walk around Gaskellian sights and sites in the city centre.\n* A trip up to the Portico Library where the Rev William Gaskell was chairman for 35 years.\n* A bus trip to Chorlton-on-Medlock and very interesting Dover Street\, once home to the Gaskells.\n* A short walk to the excellent museum that is the Elizabeth Gaskell House. \nThe story so far:\nElizabeth 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. \nGaskell 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.” \nShe 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.” \nShe 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.” \n \nElizabeth 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. \nMrs 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.” \nBut 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.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/manchester-literature-festival-tours-elizabeth-gaskell/
LOCATION:Outside St Ann’s Church\, St Ann Street\, Manchester\, United Kingdom
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251018T110000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251018T130000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250902T190356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250902T190356Z
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SUMMARY:Manchester & Slavery (on International Anti-Slavery Day)
DESCRIPTION:Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025 (International Anti-Slavery Day)\nStarts: 11am from Victoria Station wallmap.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \n \n  \n  \n  \n  \nManchester 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. \nWell 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. \n*** \nManchester 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. \nThe 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’”. \nManchester 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. \nWhile 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. \nThis 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. \nAt 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.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/manchester-slavery-on-international-anti-slavery-day/
LOCATION:Victoria Station Wallmap\, Victoria Station Approach\, Manchester\, M99 1ZW\, United Kingdom
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Slavery-Black-Joke.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251018T143000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251018T163000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250911T132923Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250911T133113Z
UID:26425-1760797800-1760805000@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Charles Dickens in Manchester. Official Literary Festival Tours
DESCRIPTION:Next tour: Saturday 18 October 2025\, during the Manchester Literature Festival.\nMeet: By the Queen Victoria statue\, Piccadilly Gardens\, 2.30pm.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.\nPrivate bookings: To book privately\, please phone Ed Glinert on 07769 29 8068. \nWhat a review on TripAdvisor! \nI 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. \n*** \nIt was the best of times; it was the worst of times. \nManchester 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. \n \nBritain’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. \nHe 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. \nYet 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. \nHe 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. \nWe 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. \nUntil then\, sample this specimen from Hard Times: \nThe 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. \nThe 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.
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/26425/
LOCATION:Queen Victoria Statue\, Piccadilly Gardens\, United Kingdom
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251025T150000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251025T163000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250923T155915Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250923T155915Z
UID:26444-1761404400-1761409800@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Alan Turing's Manchester (in conjunction with HOME Theatre's Breaking the Code
DESCRIPTION:Next walking tour: Saturday\, the 25th of October 2025.\nMeeting Place: Manchester Museum entrance\, Oxford Road\, Chorlton-on-Medlock\, 3pm.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \nAlan 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. \nWe 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. \nAt 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. \nIt 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. \nDid 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. \nAlan Turing was cremated at Woking; his life-size statue occupies pride of place in Sackville Park\, where we end the tour. \n***** \n• Many thanks to Jury’s Inn\, Manchester\, for supporting our tour. Here is their excellent tribute. \nAlan Turing of Manchester\, by Jurys Inn Manchester Hotel  \n \n \n 
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/alan-turings-manchester-in-conjunction-with-home-theatres-breaking-the-code/
LOCATION:Manchester Museum\, Oxford Road\, Chorlton-on-Medlock\, Manchester\, M13 9PL\, United Kingdom
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Alan-Turing1.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251029T111500
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251029T130000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20251026T195624Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20251026T195624Z
UID:26497-1761736500-1761742800@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Manchester & the Pre-Raphaelites (private tour)
DESCRIPTION:
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/manchester-the-pre-raphaelites-private-tour/
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20251031T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20251031T200000
DTSTAMP:20260421T152927
CREATED:20250918T094752Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250918T094752Z
UID:26435-1761933600-1761940800@www.newmanchesterwalks.com
SUMMARY:Chilling Tales from the Manchester Graveyards (on Hallowe'en)
DESCRIPTION:Next walking tour: Friday 31 October 2025 (Hallowe’en).\nMeet: Victoria Station Wallmap\, 6pm.\nBooking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. \nEnter\, if you dare\, a nether world of murder\, assassination\, hanging\, homicide\, regicide\, talking corpses and some really nasty stuff. \nThere 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. \nThese 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. \nHis 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. \nThis is just one of many deathly stories we’ve dug up and revived for this chilling tour with the equally frightening Ed Glinert. \nIt’s a grave night out! \n \n 
URL:https://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/event/chilling-tales-from-the-manchester-graveyards-on-halloween/
LOCATION:Victoria Station Wallmap\, Victoria Station Approach\, Manchester\, M99 1ZW\, United Kingdom
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