Author Archives: ed

Today, a year ago, we heard the sad news that Manchester’s greatest music talent, Mark E Smith, had left us. Wherever Mark has landed you can be sure he is not resting in peace but is giving whoever is in charge a piece of his mind!
A genius, a curmudgeon, an iconoclast, an art terrorist…irascible, irreverent, irredeemable…the late Mark E. Smith, leader of The Fall, the only band to be named after an Albert Camus novella, Manchester’s longest-running group, were formed in the earliest days of punk, spurred on by the Sex Pistols’ 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs, their debut at an Arts Council bash on King Street.
* Mark E Smith’s Manchester, guided tour, this Sunday, 27 January, 3pm from the Queen Victoria statue (where else?) in Piccadilly Gardens.
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Calling all literature folk. We’re really looking forward to the Ted Hughes country tour tomorrow, Saturday 21 Oct, but the weather ain’t. In fact the rain gods might well be conspiring to get their revenge on Ted for all his elemental poetry.

So if you fancy using your ticket for the next such tour, in May (date to be announced) please do so. For those who brave it, if it’s raining dogs, cats and crows and it’s too debilitating to ramble the fields of Elmet we might well prepare to the nearest hostelry, or get a bus to Stubbing Wharf, and do the “tour” that way.

As for Sunday, Haworth is cancelled. Again inclement weather and the fact that no one has booked, bah.
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This is the latest information from New Manchester Walks, the city’s group of professional guides.
• The re-arranged date for the Town Hall tour on Tuesday 23 May that had to be cancelled after the bomb is Mon 3 July. Only attend, please, if you had a ticket for 23 May.
• Wednesday is Jewish Manchester day: two kosher tours.
• Don’t forget, every day, “Welcome to Manchester” at 1.30pm from the Visitor Centre.
• Thursday marks the 21st anniversary of the 1996 IRA bomb when no one was killed. Appropriately, we are donating the proceeds to the 2017 bomb victims’ fund.
• And as for that bee. Why?
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Huge docks which once harboured the world’s ocean-going liners. Gleaming museums of the modern age. A world famous canal, as deep as Suez, as powerful as the Panama.

Here a new city has risen; a city of glass, steel and burnished metal, bold and brilliant. On one side of the water the silver shards of the Imperial War Museum North. On the other the Lowry Centre, a matchless theatre for the matchstick figure artist. And they have now been joined by Media City, the futuristic home of the BBC.

Alongside, stretches the water, filling the old Manchester Docks, cleaned and spruced for leisure and pleasure.

We explore the new city on the old canal, switching to and from the hi-tech world of today to the days when the Port of Manchester thrived as the 4th largest in the country.
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A big thankyou to the people of Manchester and the rest of the world for supporting our walks. 66 for the Peterloo Massacre, 40 on the canal cruise, 35 for the Midland Hotel, 37 for the Pankhursts over the last couple of weeks.

Keep on coming, especially for a special “Russian Manchester” on Wednesday 8 March to mark the centenary of the start of the Russian Revolution. It’s a 1.30 start from Victoria Station wallmap, which is as close as we could get to the Finland Station where the thousands greeted Lenin off the train from Germany in spring 1917.
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A genius, a curmudgeon, an iconoclast, an art terrorist…irascible, irreverent, irredeemable…the late Mark E. Smith, leader of The Fall, the only band to be named after an Albert Camus novella, Manchester’s longest-running group, formed in the earliest days of punk, spurred on by the Sex Pistols’ 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs, their debut at an Arts Council bash on King Street.

As we wrote when the great man died
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