Author Archives: ed

* The next expert tour of John Rylands Library (and more) is on
Thursday 1 February 2024, starting at St Ann’s Church at 11.30am.
* To book, please press continue reading and follow the simple steps!
Here’s a taster:
The Reading Room of the John Rylands Library on Deansgate is lined with statues of leading figures from history in the fields of the arts and religion. They include one of Francis Bacon. Not the irascible Dublin-born painter, but the genius late Elizabethan/early 17th century philosopher and politician. Bacon was the first English intellectual to pick up on the Kabbalist notion that all knowledge could be contained under two headings, zero and one, thereby pre-empting computer algebra by over three hundred years.
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This is Kate Dibble, “fellow” Manchester tour guide. Kate doesn’t do any tours, but she has spent the best part of the last 15 years trying to stop New Manchester Walks’ Ed Glinert from doing tours. Kate has been instrumental in banning and excluding Glinert from every single guiding group he has a right to belong to – Manchester Guided Tours, the rota to do Discover Manchester, the rota to do the Town Hall tour, the Guild of Manchester Tour Guides and the North-West Association of Tour Guides.
Why?
Because Ed Glinert is Jewish, and Kate and her friends don’t want a Jew in their circle.
Kate is now being investigated by Marketing Manchester, the British Guild of Tourist Guides, the national Institute of Tourist Guiding and various Jewish representative groups. Also, the press are keen on this, part of a much bigger story.
Well done, Kate!
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John Stalker dead; a sad day for Manchester as another chapter in the city’s history closes.

John Stalker was deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester in the 1980s, but that doesn’t do him justice. Stalker was good cop to Anderton’s bad cop. Where James Anderton, his boss, chief constable of the county, was the cult of the personality embodied, manic, maverick, out of control, obsessed with waging war on the population’s morals, a Northern version of the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Stalker was an old-fashioned down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness traditional copper, not in the farcical Gene Hunt mould but more Jack Meadows than Tom Chandler or Guy Mannion.

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Despite lockdown we are working flat out to provide a respite from the horrors of Covid with a host of Zoom talk-tours, devised by Ed Glinert, the North-West’s most energetic and best-researched historian. Here’s what we’re doing:

Ancoats * Angel Meadow * Beatles Liverpool coach tour * Cottonopolis
* Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester * Formidable Women of Manchester
* Hidden Gems of Manchester * Intellectual Manchester Pub Tour
* Liverpool’s Wonderful Waterfront * Manchester Architecture
* Manchester Music Coach Tour * Manchester and Slavery * Manchester in 12 Songs * Marx & Engels * Midland Hotel * Northern Quarter * Pankhursts of Manchester * Peterloo * Pre-Raphaelites of Manchester Art Gallery * Secret History of Manchester * Strangeways: No Escape *
Town Hall * Underground Manchester.

Press for more outside Manchester in Liverpool and London.
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R.I.P. Nijinsky, King of the Kippax
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**STOP PRESS** TOUR ON HOLD FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.
Hello to everyone who comes on our tours. We have a new system in place for tours of Chetham’s and the Cathedral. One reason why we have not been able to do tours recently is because the long-standing librarian, Michael Powell, sadly passed away last year. We are all still in a state of shock. Michael was much loved and admired.

The Library is now ready to welcome our expert tours again, but because it needs much funding to maintain its status and 15th century foundations, it has put a price on each visitor of £6.50 a head. All visitors on tours now have to pay this very reasonable charge, but on our tour you get Ed Glinert’s unrivalled knowledge of the building, its history…all told with Ed’s infamous wit and panache. 
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This is a photo of Richard Sherwood, Head of Commercial Partnerships at Marketing Manchester. On Wednesday, August 9, 2023, Sherwood wrote to me, Ed Glinert, Manchester’s leading historian and most prolific tour guide at New Manchester Walks, to say:

“Dear Ed, It’s been brought to our attention from a visitor that there has been a complaint raised following a tour cancellation. We’re deeply concerned about complaints of this nature.”

So deeply concerned is Richard Sherwood, that it is now January 2024 and I still haven’t been told what the complaint is! This is gross incompetence on the part of the tourist board and is causing me monumental stress.
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We wish you the season’s greetings and the best of health, and look forward to seeing you in the new year whether you be furloughed, locked down or locked up.
Many Manchester guides have given up. We haven’t!
We are starting the year with The Masterpieces of Manchester on Tue 4 Jan (Central Library, 11.30am), Southern Cemetery Wed 5 Jan (main gates, 11.30am), the Pankhursts Sat 8 (Emmeline statue, 11.30am), Manchester Music Sat 8 (HOME, 2pm) and Angel Meadow Sun 9 Jan (Victoria Station wallmap, 11.30am).
Yes, they’re free to registerfor, but as we’re not paid by the council, the tourist board, a multi-national company, or indeed anyone, we hope you can part with a few shekels at the end and throw them into the guide’s hat!
—Ed Glinert—
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Always wondered what the fuss was about with David Bowie? After all, some of those albums the critics push – The Lodger, Scary Monsters, Let’s Dance – turn out to be filled with nonsense. Come on; those instrumentals on the other side of Low, which no one plays. That’s Bowie taking your for a ride. But it wasn’t always that way. He made remarkable music when he could be bothered.
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Fellow walkers:
Our mobile/I-pad site ain’t working, but all is not lost.

The website is working perfickly on big computers, and everything can be booked on Facebook or eventbrite.

Meanwhile, we have the finest minds in computer-land – Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, maybe even Eric Gates – working on fixing it.
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