Jonathan Schofield Manchester Tours
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  • EXCLUSIVE TOUR: New Century Tour, perfection in design from 1963
  • FREE Castlefield - the 2,000 year guestlist
  • Manchester Necropolis: rattle my bones
  • FREE Scientists, sinners and graveyards: A Tale of Two Citie
  • Literary Manchester: A city in words
  • Heaton Hall and Park Tour
  • Halloween tours
  • EXCLUSIVE: 'Boldest Building' Tour, Edgar Wood Centre
  • EXCLUSIVE: Refuge/ Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
  • EXCLUSIVE Hallé St Peter’s & Ancoats Tour NEW
  • Saturday Walkabout Series: Music, Pubs, Ghosts
  • EXCLUSIVE: Mayfield Station tours
  • The Tour of Uninteresting Objects
  • Secrets of Angel Meadow and the Irk ValleyAir, Scuttlers, Lost Churches and Hidden Stories
  • EXCLUSIVE Salford Lads Club and Middlewood Locks
  • Secrets of Chapel Street & Greengatel Park
  • EXCLUSIVE: Ordsall Hall and Manchester Ship Canal tour
  • Sleazy & Sinister Mcr
  • Secrets of Ancoats & New Islington
  • Stockport Secrets
  • Secrets of Littleborough
  • The Secrets of Gorton Monastery
  • April Fool's Day Tour - The Incredibly Serious Tour
  • Knutsford Secrets
  • Friedrich Engels And Karl Marx Tours
  • Secrets of Fairfield Moravian Settlement
  • The Death & Beer Tour 2022
  • Secrets of Rochdale town centre
  • Secret Tunnels Tour
  • Didsbury, Kersal, Quays tours
  • Death, Beauty & Beer Tour of Brooklands and Sale
  • Magical Manchester Mystery Tour - by bike
  • Whalley Range & Alexandra Park
  • Peterloo Massacre: The Reality & The Drama
  • Castlefield, St Johns, First Street
  • ​Chorlton tour
  • The Secrets of Middleton
  • The Day The World Got Smaller Tour
  • Truly Madly Brutal
  • The Pan-African Congress, Slavery, and Thomas Clarkson Tour: A Manchester Anniversary Tour
  • Suffragettes, Women & Manchester
  • Talk: Lost Buildings of Manchester & Salford
  • Platt Fields, Birch Fields and Rusholme Tour
  • The Prestwich Tour: The surprising Manchester series
  • Tour Diary: Confessions of a guide
  • Some tours
  • The Zoom Tours series
  • Loyalty card/scheme
  • EXCLUSIVE: Chetham's Library and College House
  • First Wednesday Spinningfields Series 2020
  • Exclusive: 35 King St & Georgian Manchester
  • Secrets of the University of Manchester with interior visits
  • Totally Manchester - a general tour of the city
  • Architecture & Planning: why does Manchester look like it does?
  • Bombed & Besieged: Manchester at War
  • Some Published Articles On Manchester's Present, its Heritage and Tourism
  • Secrets of the Northern Quarter
  • The Rollicking Pub Tour
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Old Trafford
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Bradford & Clayton
  • EXCLUSIVE: Kampus tours, the abandoned warehouses
  • Incredible Interiors
  • Shock, Surprise, Prose & Verse: Manchester and Literature
  • Ford Madox Brown and Pre-Raphaelite Manchester
  • Podcasts
  • Lost Graveyards and the Dead
  • Return to 1421: The Old Towne and Medieval Manchester
  • Suggested Private Tours
  • Anthony Burgess and Literary Manchester Tour
  • Great Northern Tunnel Tour
  • 1840s Manchester: The Key Decade, talk and tour
  • Burns Night Tour Monday 25 January
  • Fire Station Tours: Calling Photographers & Sketchers
  • Manchester City of Art Tour
  • Valentine's Day tour 14 February
  • The Gallery
  • The Ghosts of Afflecks & the Northern Quarter
  • New Manchester Squares Tour
  • The Manchester Guardian is 200 tour
  • The Understanding Architecture Series
  • FREE The Hidden Rivers Tour

First Wednesday Spinningfields series

12 noon every first Wednesday of the month from April
​
One hour lunchtime tours but you can leave whenever you want

​FREE


April 1
The Dark Side of Spinningfields.
The area was once known as the 13th District and contained the notorious Green Man pub with its crazy and unruly entertainment. The area went from a sweet and pretty area of big houses with gardens and summer houses to a place of dense working class accommodation over a couple of decades and by the middle nineteenth century was no as a fetid ‘rookery’, a slum which needed its own charities such as Wood Street Mission. Mary Burns lived in this deprived area in the 1840s and became the lover of German writer and businessman, Friedrich Engels, the best friend of Karl Marx. She was his passport to witnessing the lives of the poor in this period of early industrialisation, and thus was instrumental in giving the world The Communist Manifesto.
 
May 6
The Hardest Worked River in the World.
A stroll around the River Irwell and Leftbank as far as the Victoria & Albert, Le Meridian, Hotel at St John's. A tour wrapped up with the Ice Maiden ghost, the tragedy of the ship called Emma, stirring deeds and pioneering science. The Irwell is the North’s mini-Danube, separating the two cities of Manchester and Salford just as the Danube does Buda and Pest. In the 1700s it was famously sweet river, teeming with life, with trout and salmon. Now after 200 years of pollution, brown trout are back and the developers have turned to face the river once more. The river is alive again and this tour brings it alive for guests.
 
June 3
John Rylands Library and the People's History Museum
Two buildings, two incredible collections. A tour that explains the architecture and the significance, one building built for beauty and learning, the other for industry and power. The powerful personalities behind the buildings are also revealed and some of the items on display discussed. For example the woman who gave the city the library is Cuban-born Enriqueta Rylands. There was a whiff of scandal around the circumstances of her marriage to John Rylands but eventually she became the first woman to receive the Freedom of the City.
 
July 1
Bright lights, big plans, and a world-famous University is born.
The south side of Spinningfields into St John's Gardens is full of amazing stories from treading the boards at the Opera House, the houses with pleasure gardens at Hardman Square, the 1945 'classic' skyscraper that was refused planning permission, the strangest bollards in Britain and how Manchester merchant John Owens instigated the University of Manchester. There is drama, intrigue and wooden streets.
 
August 5
Deansgate and Spinningfields tour
Deansgate is an old Roman Road with a possibly a Viking inspired name. This was the street down which cavaliers attacked the town in English Civil War, but also where fashion took root in the nineteenth century. It is still host to the oldest family owned music shop in Europe. The stories of the pubs, still here and disappeared, are fascinating too, and there’s an alleyway on the tour where the devil came to Manchester and also a room which used to host the Club for Fat Men
. 

All these tours are sponsored by Spinningfields Estate Limited. They all take place at noon on the first Thursday of the month from April until August and are free of charge. The tours last an hour but you can jump on and off whatever time suits to fit with your lunch hour. 

Reserve tickets here. 



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