No dates yet. Description to follow.  

Next walking tour: Sat 1 June 2024, 2pm. Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street. Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. *** Boho Manchester, cool Manchester, modish Manchester, funky but chic Manchester. It’s the Northern Quarter. A land of crumbling cotton factories, sky-scraping fire-escapes, Bohemian bars, downhome hidden spaces, cult markets, chic galleries …
Continue reading →

Next walking tour: SOON!, 12 noon. Meet: Outside Knutsford Sessions Courthouse, Toft Road, near Knutsford Station. (Hopefully the train will be on time!) Booking: This is a sumptuous tour laced with character and charisma, for Knutsford is the classiest village in Cheshire, smouldering with salubriousness and serenity. We will stroll around town to hear about …
Continue reading →

Next tour: No dates yet. Meet: Outside The Eighth Day, 111 Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, time tbc. It’s an amazing story. Read on and marvel at the pics below. Hulme became the setting for one of the most extraordinary social engineering-cum-architectural projects Britain has ever seen. It was demolished, destroyed and rebuilt twice in the 20th century. …
Continue reading →

Next tour: Thursday 5 July. Start: Manchester Museum reception, off Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, 11.30am. Ends: The newly-reopened Gaskell House. It’s the biggest centre of learning in Europe – colleges and universities, ivy-clad quads, red-brick labs, dreaming spires, and thousands of students populating a corridor of academia and accomplishment. Its history is studded with Nobel Prize winners and …
Continue reading →

Next tour: No dates yet. Meet: Outside Didsbury Village Metrolink stop. Booking: Didsbury is the most desirable suburb in Manchester, free of the legacy of grimy industry, unsympathetic town planning and the detritus of urban life. Many of the grand villas where formidable figures such as Daniel Adamson, pioneer of the Manchester Ship Canal, and John …
Continue reading →

Next tour: To be decided. Meet: Greek Church, 400 Bury New Road, M7 4EY. Here’s a new one. “The Long Road to Strangeways: From The Cliff to the Clink”. We start in quaint, olde-worlde Salford, where period lampposts, rambling villas and long disused tram tracks make for a most unusual landscape in what seems a …
Continue reading →

Next tour: Castlefield pub walk, Friday 2 August, 6pm. Meet: Beetham Tower Entrance on Deansgate. Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. Castlefield is not only the Roman birthplace of Manchester, it was also the industrial birthplace of the city in the 18th century, and one of the most important historical sites in the …
Continue reading →

Next tour: No dates yet. Meet: Malmaison Hotel, 3 Piccadilly, time tbc. Ardwick was once so desirable a suburb the richest and most powerful men in Manchester (Nathan Mayer Rothschild, John Rylands) sought it out for their mansions. Okay that was two hundred years ago. Things have changed since. The rich folk have gone. The mansions …
Continue reading →

Next tour: Saturday 2 November 2024  Meet: Victoria Station wallmap, 2pm. Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. “The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy, and most wicked locality in Manchester…full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants and tramps.” Was this yesterday? No, journalist Angus Bethune Reach was writing in …
Continue reading →