This is the list of tours are now live on sale with eventbrite. Please check on our website calendar before setting off. 2019 (Year of Peterloo) • Sat 26 Jan The History of the Northern Quarter Meet Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 11.30am. Boho Manchester, cool Manchester, modish Manchester, funky but chic Manchester. It’s the Northern Quarter. A land of crumbling cotton factories, sky-scraping fire-escapes, Bohemian bars, downhome hidden spaces, cult markets, chic galleries and cardamom-scented, sizzingly-cheap curry cafes; a style haven shaped in marble, steel and beechwood, with streets named in Mediterranean tiles and pavements slabbed in mosaic. • Sat 26 Jan Ancoats: From Irish Town to Little Italy Meet Band on the Wall, Swan Street, 2.30pm. We explore the backstreets and forgotten corners of the world’s first industrial community, converted from market gardens and fields with frightening ferocity into a land of mills blackened with soot at the end of the 18^th century, colonised by Italians fleeing il Risorgimento to bring ice cream to the begrimed city in the 19^th century, abandoned by the council with forcible depopulating in the 20^th century, and now being imaginatively revived as essential 21^st century Manchester. • Sun 27 Jan Manchester in 12 Songs Meet Malmaison Hotel, No. 3 Piccadilly, 12 noon. The sounds of the city, courtesy of the Smiths, Joy Division, the Fall, elbow, John Cooper Clarke… We will walk in search of the stories that chime with the sounds that have made Manchester one of the world’s greatest music centres. Yes, we play the tune at its rightful location. Ingenious! • Sun 27 Jan Mark E. Smith Tribute Tour (One Year On) Meet Queen Victoria Statue (obviously), Piccadilly Gardens, 3pm. Wherever Mark has landed you can be sure he is not resting in piece but is giving whoever is in charge a piece of his mind! • Tue 29 Jan Mediaeval Manchester (Ale-Tasters and Groat-Smashers) Meet Shudehill Metrolink, 11am. We emerge from the 21st century into a land of timber-framed houses, olde worlde pubs frequented by Guy Fawkes, the threat of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army gathering by the ford of the Mersey, a Manchester of ale-tasters, kersie makers and groat-smashers settling around the unspoilt Tudor cloisters of Chetham’s, the most formidable 15th century building in the north of England. • Tue 29 Jan Southern Cemetery Meet Cemetery Gates, Barlow Moor Road, 2.30pm. New Manchester Walks will take you around Southern Cemetery, final resting place of some of the greats of Manchester history, with Ed Glinert, author of “London’s Dead” (published by HarperCollins). We will see the graves and memories of Matt Busby, John Rylands, Joe Sunlight, Daniel Adamson, Tony Wilson and L. S. Lowry, as we explore Britain’s second biggest cemetery. • Wed 30 Jan The Pre-Raphaelites & The Town Hall Murals (version) Meet Art Gallery, Mosley Street, 11am. A Metrolink all-dayer might be a good idea A quick look at the paintings of the Art Gallery and then it’s off on Metrolink’s finest to see the ones that have been transferred to the Lowry Centre for their exhibition and representations of the 12 Town Hall Ford Madox Brown murals. • Thu 31 Jan The Grand Hotels of Manchester Meet Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 1.30pm. Once there was only the Midland. There was nowhere else grand to stay in Manchester; well apart from the Grand. Now there’s the Britannia, the Palace, the Great John Street Boutique Hotel, the Radisson, the Hilton and the Lowry. Five star and four star; penthouse and pavement; suites laden with stars, express lifts, chic restaurants, banqueting rooms and conference centres. Afternoon tea perhaps a necessary extra. • Thu 31 Jan Brady, Hindley, Shipman, the Ripper, the Hangman & the Unmentionable One Meet Central Library, St Peter’s Sq, 5.30pm. !BAD TOUR! AS DENOUNCED IN THE SUN & THE OLDHAM TIMES This is a journey into an immoral maze, a moral abyss, a trip around the dark underbelly of Manchester to hear barely believable stories of public hangings, serial killers, headless bodies, sadism, fascism, nuclear destruction, wartime horror, riot, rebellion unrest and some really nasty things, courtesy of the bad, the badder and the ugly: Jimmy Savile, Lord Haw-Haw, Harold Shipman, Oswald Mosley, the murderers of Peterloo, the Moors Murderers, the Yorkshire Ripper, Jack the Ripper – and some really evil types. * Stop press. For reasons that escape the organisers there has been some criticism from people who think we shouldn’t mention any of this. Yes, it was the failure to speak out and condemn that kept these crimes brewing. We say: expose, elucidate, educate.