Author Archives: ed

First 2024 tours: Angel Meadow, Southern Cemetery and John Rylands Library. Please see Calendar. These must be booked and paid for in advance on Eventbrite. We will be taking you around Manchester in 2024 on a huge range of tours…from Angel Meadow to Strangeways; from Jewish Manchester to Secret Manchester, and all points in between: art, architecture, Alan Turing, the Pankhursts, Lowry, Peterloo, Marx & Engels…
Our tours have been expertly and entertainingly devised by Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and most prolific tour guide, who has now completed nearly 6,000 local tours.
In 2024, Ed Glinert, a much-published author, will be formally writing the definitive history of the world’s greatest industrial city: “Manchester, the Biography”. At last Manchester will have a properly-written, accurate history from before the Romans to Manc-hattan and the ever name-changing Factory International via cotton, industry, Peterloo, the Pankhursts, the Blitz, the town planning disasters of the 60s, the birth of a local music scene and Manchester as a science and technology hub.
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Coming to Manchester – from Boston, Bangkok, Basingstoke, Bermuda, Bahrain, or all points between – then book a tour with Ed Glinert, Manchester’s best informed and wittiest historian, Britain’s most prolific tour guide, Arts Society lecturer, cruise ships speaker, Penguin Classics editor, renowned author…and a general authority on anything worth knowing –  architecture, art, football, Jewish history, literature, music, politics, religious history…all the important stuff and a bit more.
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Our new leaflet for January-May 2017 is out and available at a library, museum, gallery, venue, tourist attraction, bridge club near you now!
The programme is packed with all the usual favourites: Peterloo, Ancoats, Engels & Marx, the Canal Cruise, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Pankhursts…
* Unfortunately, the new year has started with a problem. We’ve just discovered that Chetham’s Library is closed until Wednesday the 4th, which rather kyboshes our tour this Tuesday. In recompense Ed Glinert will concentrate on the Cathedral, mediaeval Manchester and Chetham’s from the outside for a reduced £5. Very sorry about this. Mistakes happen.
Click New Manchester Walks brochure 2017 to view our brochure in full.

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Have a great new year in these most trying times, folks.

One thing that doesn’t stop is Manchester history, and this is where it starts with guided tours, Zooms, cruise ships talks – devised by Ed Glinert, Manchester’s most energetic historian and most prolific tour guide.

New Manchester Walks is the only guiding outfit in the region open to all guides without fear or favour; no cliques, no proffering of coloured badges. We never stop working and opening up local history with original research.

See you on the streets or on your laptop!
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Seasonal greetings as we recover from the day when no one works, apart from doctors, nurses, bar staff, spin doctors and tour guides.

Ed Glinert is back in Manchester, hungry for Mediaeval Manchester and Strangeways on Saturday 28 December, followed on the Sunday by Ancoats and Angel Meadow, and a host of other imminent tours. Please book on eventbrite as usual.
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Stuck for another Christmas gift? Buy a voucher or two from www.quaytickets.com and redeem them on any walk (apart from the Midland Hotel). Or maybe tickets for the canal cruise. What a great simple Christmas gift.
Now, sixty-five years ago, what would you have bought the friend or relative that had everything? Why, a computer of course, the very latest new fangled toy…
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Join Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and most prolific tour guide, an expert on Jewish history and religion, on Friday the 29th of December, for the only FREE expert tour of Manchester’s old Jewish ghetto, to find old synagogues, the building that was the centre of world Zionism, to hear about Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Oliver Cromwell, Robert Maxwell and Karl Marx. (Two of those weren’t Jewish. Which two?) .

We start at 11.30am from the wallmap in Victoria Station, where thousands of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe arrived some 120 years ago fleeing persecution and seeking a better life – in America. So why were they in Manchester? Ah! Please book on Eventbrite.
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This is the list of tours now live on sale with eventbrite. Please check on our website calendar before setting off. Some are getting sold out but there will be plenty of future dates!

• Sat 26 Jan The History of the Northern Quarter
Meet Queen Victoria Statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 11.30am.
!!SOLD OUT!!

• 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…

• 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…

• 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 peace but is giving whoever is in charge a piece of his mind!

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• 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.
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Coronation Street celebrates 60 glorious years on Wednesday the 9th of December and we are marking the occasion with a new tour: “Classic Corrie Coach Tour on Zoom”.

So whether you live in Windsor, Winnipeg, Wooka Wooka or Weatherfield, you can join legendary tour guide Ed Glinert, one of the very few official Manchester tour guides who has taken groups down the cobbles, on a rip-roaring, mind-blowing, eye-opening trail through the great stories from Coronation Street’s golden days at the places where they were filmed.
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