The Peterloo Massacre Walk - The Drama, The Reality & THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE REVEALED
10.30am Saturday 15 August 2026
Two hundred and six years ago an event in Manchester defined the British struggle for democracy. In August 1819 came a day that coined a phrase and stirred a nation. This tour takes in the key locations associated with a peaceful meeting in central Manchester that ended in death and mayhem. Expect powerful words, poetry and contemporary context.
'If you want Peterloo explained with verve, wit and real knowledge then this the easily the best tour around,' Marple Historical Society.
Meet outside Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, City centre, M2 3JL
Tickets:
£20 adults
Under 12s free
Duration: most tours last between ninety minutes and two hours
Fully accessible
Totally fascinating
'If you want Peterloo explained with verve, wit and real knowledge then this the easily the best tour around,' Marple Historical Society.
Meet outside Manchester Art Gallery, Mosley Street, City centre, M2 3JL
Tickets:
£20 adults
Under 12s free
Duration: most tours last between ninety minutes and two hours
Fully accessible
Totally fascinating
More about Peterloo
This crucial event in the struggle for British democracy took place on 16 August 1819. The site lies under the Convention Quarter of the city centre.
The meeting was part of a larger movement campaigning for a national extension of the vote to all adults at a time of deepening poverty. It also called for representation in Parliament with a redistribution of MPs to new industrial towns such as Manchester.
To have little direct influence on the government was a cause of growing anger. Thousands, in particular of handloom weavers, were caught in a downward spiral of wages and a rise in the price of bread. Representation for them was a matter of life and death. Words typical of the mood were incorporated in the Declaration to be sent to London by the protesters: ‘Governments, not immediately derived from and strictly accountable to the People, are usurpations and ought to be resisted and destroyed'.
Yet, despite this, the leader of the meeting Henry Hunt asked people to come ‘armed with no other weapon but that of a self approving conscience; determined not to be irritated or excited.’ He didn’t want the magistrates to have an excuse for violence.
It didn’t work.
Shortly before 1pm, the chair of the magistrates, William Hulton, decided the ‘town was in great danger’, read the riot act and sent the deeply unpopular deputy constable, Joseph Nadin, to arrest Hunt. Nadin said it was impossible so the troops were called in.
Unfortunately it was the volunteer Manchester and Salford Yeomanry who reacted first. Moving into a crowd of around more than 60,000 the Yeomanry became separated from each other, panicked and started to lash out with their sabres. Finally the regular soldiers, the 15th Hussars, led by Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange, arrived and within 15 minutes the field was clear.
Eighteen people died as a result of the action taken and more than 600 were injured. The event was nicknamed Peterloo through its location at St Peter’s Field in Manchester and because participants on both sides had fought at the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier.
The immediate effect was further government repression but the long-term influence was one of disenchantment with the existing electoral system, a key step towards modern democracy had been taken. Shortly after the event, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote the Masque of Anarchy about the massacre with the famous final lines: ‘Rise, like lions after slumber, In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew, Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many—they are few!’
Yet there is another aspect to Peterloo that has been underplayed but emphasised a fundamentally vital aspect of growing and maintaining a democracy. This is perhaps the most significant aspect of the awful day and will be discussed on the tour.