Category Archives: News

The next full, detailed tour of the Ford Madox Brown Murals in Manchester Town Hall is scheduled to take place on August Bank Holiday Monday (31 Aug 2015). This is going to be a de-luxe offering…please let us know if you intend coming along and don’t forget to check the website as close to the event as possible. Continue reading →

We can now take bookings for PRIVATE tours of the soaring Clock Tower at Manchester Town Hall. So if your social group, pals or workplace would like a tour, please let us know by e-mailing info@newmanchesterwalks.com. Time waits for no one, it’s true, but New Manchester Walks is once again in time with the city. Continue reading →

How surprising that in Manchester, the most modern of cities, the world’s first industrial city, one of the oldest Christian relics ever discovered in Britain should be found, and to complete the irony it was in the shadow of one of the most prominent modern structures, the Beetham Tower. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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? Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →

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 Continue reading →

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. Continue reading →