Next tour: Fri 26 October 2018. Meet: Entrance, John Rylands Library, 2.30pm. Booking: Soon with eventbrite. This is an ingenious new tour dedicated to a man who probably never came to Manchester. But why should that matter? The city centre is alive with mementos to the Bard and dedications to his protagonists. We’ve found seven obvious locations (just …
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Next tour: Fri 26 October 2018. Meet: Queen Victoria statue, Piccadilly Gardens, 11.30am. Words, phrases, ideas, claims, injunctions, entreaties, accusations, threats, memories…“Tho’ much is taken, much abides…which in old days Mov’d earth and heaven”. We honour the greatest writers – Tennyson (that’s him, above), Shelley, Tennyson, Byron, Rossetti, John Cooper Clarke – and explain their links with …
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Next tour: No public dates at the moment. Meet: Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, time tbc. Booking: Perfect for a private booking! The three great epic novels set in and around Manchester are Magnolia Street (Louis Golding, 1932), Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (1933) and Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring (1940). Each is vast, …
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Next walking tour: Tue 15 Oct 2024 Meet: Outside St Ann’s Church, St Ann’s Square, 1pm. Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. He was a polymath and polyglot who chain smoked for England and wrote more words than Dickens, Wells and Trollope combined. Manchester was his city, even though once he had enough …
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Please contact the guide, John Alker, on 07759 173786 for further details.

Next tour: Friday 8 November, during the Manchester Literature Festival. Meet: Outside the Mercure Hotel, Portland Street, 1pm. Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite. Private bookings: To book privately, please phone Ed Glinert on 07769 29 8068. What a review on TripAdvisor! “I booked myself and some Irish/Canadian visitors on a special Charles Dickens’s …
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When Julie Goodyear first turned up at Granada to play Bet Lynch in 1966, a friend gave her a lift into Manchester in his van. In the back was a cement mixer. Julie expected the pal to drop her on the main road, but as it was raining he insisted in pulling up outside the TV company’s front entrance on Atherton Street. By an amazing coincidence Pat Phoenix was just getting out of her Rolls Royce at the same time. Pat looked Julie up and down “as if I were a piece of dog dirt on her shoe,” as Julie recalled, and said, “‘Don’t you ever, ever dare to upstage me again, young lady.’”
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Manchester Man of the mid-19th century wanted to show the world that the place was more than just a forest of smokestack industries and belching chimneys by creating a city of culture; a metropolis where the arts and the glories of civilisation could flourish alongside commerce and manufacturing. Success followed. Manchester became known for its …
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