Hi folks,

Ed Glinert here. Really looking forward to meeting everyone back on the streets of Manchester, Liverpool, Worsley, Knutsford, Haworth, London or wherever my tour is! We will be continuing Zoom as well, because the format allows us to do things we can’t do in real life.

To illustrate this think of the Manchester Town Hall tour. The building is closed till 2024, but even when it reopens and you go on a walking tour you might find half the key rooms unavailable due to weddings, conferences, political meetings. But on our Manchester Town Hall De-Luxe Tour on Zoom we can take you into every room, examine every key view, statue, prison cell – even the Lord Mayor’s private apartments – something unavailable on a normal tour. And all that in the usual Zoom format of an hour. Then there are the Ford Madox Brown murals. To do them justice we need an extra tour. John Alker and I have done more research into these paintings than anyone else on the planet, and we love to share our knowledge with you.

Now here’s some housekeeping regarding Zooms. It’s a new technology that needs a little tweaking. If you book on to one of our Zooms we send you the codes just before the tour. On tourist board advice, we can’t send them out earlier, such as when you book, or a day before, for all sorts of obvious reasons which we’re not allowed to state in public.

Very rarely someone writes in very upset that they never received the codes and missed the tour. This is technically impossible; everyone gets the codes at the same time. However I fully sympathise with anyone who couldn’t find the codes for whatever reason and missed the tour, which is why we deploy a most generous system. Let us know and we’ll put you on the next one. You don’t have to “register” as one lady has claimed. This system also works if you do join the tour but then something goes wrong at your end and you miss it. Let us know and we’ll put you on the next one.

I think this is the perfect solution, but please please don’t go on Facebook and tell the world that we’re nasty horrible people! We have put unbelievable amounts of work into these Zooms and we’re getting enough flak from the guiding authorities for daring to do them in the first place. You won’t miss out!