• Sat 9 Feb Peterloo Part 1 (“We are on the Brink of Liberty”)
Meet Central Library, St Peter’s Sq, 11.30am.

• Sat 9 Feb Peterloo Part 2 (“Remember the Foul Deeds of Peterloo”)
Meet Central Library, St Peter’s Sq, 2.30pm.

Thanks to extraordinary amounts of research, we have devised two unique and ingenious new Peterloo tours. In Part One we run through the horrendous social conditions in Manchester during the misnamed elegant age of the Regency, and consider which were the most dreadful: the poor wages, poverty, filth, disease and lack of any political rights. In Part Two we detail what followed Peterloo: harsher laws, an attempt to assassinate the entire Cabinet and a short-lived Peterloo Memorial.

• Sun 10 Feb Alan Turing Tortured Genius of the Computer Age
Meet Manchester Museum reception, 12 noon.
He broke the Nazis’ Enigma code, almost invented the computer, and was persecuted to a painful suicide by the ungrateful authorities.

• Sun 10 Feb Manchester Music: The Hacienda Years
Meet HOME Arts Centre, 3pm.
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.

• Mon 25 Feb Anthony Burgess Annual Birthday Celebration
Meet St Ann’s Church, 11.30am. 

• Thu 28 Feb Angel Meadow Victorian Hell-Hole
Meet Victoria Station wallmap, 6pm.
Journalist Angus Bethune Reach called Angel Meadow: “the lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy, and most wicked locality in Manchester…full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants and tramps.” Nice!