Jonathan Schofield Manchester Tours
  • HOME
  • Calendar of tours
  • GUEST COMMENTS
  • Some tours in pictures
  • Manchester books by Jonathan Schofield
  • Terms & Conditions
  • CONTACT DETAILS AND BIOGRAPHY
  • VOUCHERS & DEALS
  • Tour Diary: Confessions of a guide
  • Saturday Walkabout Series: Music, Pubs, Ghosts
  • Valentine's Day tour 14 February
  • Sleazy & Sinister Mcr
  • Heaton Hall and Park Tour
  • EXCLUSIVE: Refuge/ Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
  • ​Chorlton tour
  • The Tour of Uninteresting Objects
  • Bombed & Besieged: Manchester at War
  • This Mighty Manchester
  • New Year's Day tour 2025
  • Secrets of Ancoats & New Islington
  • Lost and Imagined talk
  • EXCLUSIVE Salford Lads Club and Middlewood Locks
  • EXCLUSIVE: Chetham's Library and College House
  • Whalley Range & Alexandra Park
  • Knutsford Secrets
  • Secrets of Didsbury
  • Suffragettes, Women & Manchester
  • Secrets of Strangeways & Cheetham Hill
  • Trees, flowers and Mcr's Green Spaces Tour
  • Death, Beauty & Beer Tour of Brooklands and Sale
  • Secrets of Angel Meadow and the Irk ValleyAir, Scuttlers, Lost Churches and Hidden Stories
  • Liverpool - in two parts
  • Southern Cemetery Tour
  • Truly Madly Brutal
  • EXCLUSIVE TOUR: New Century Tour, perfection in design from 1963
  • Halloween tours
  • FREE - ​Ballads, battles and big ideas: Embankment, Salford
  • The Secrets of Gorton Monastery
  • Friedrich Engels And Karl Marx Tours
  • The Secrets of Altrincham
  • Manchester Cathedral tour
  • Literary Manchester: A city in words
  • The First Street tour – People, Music, Arts, Mills
  • Stones of Manchester
  • Manchester Necropolis: rattle my bones
  • Secrets of Wilmslow 2025
  • EXCLUSIVE: 'Boldest Building' Tour, Edgar Wood Centre
  • Spinningfields Tours - Free
  • FREE Scientists, sinners and graveyards: A Tale of Two Citie
  • Architecture & Planning: why does Manchester look like it does?
  • EXCLUSIVE Hallé St Peter’s & Ancoats Tour NEW
  • EXCLUSIVE: Mayfield Station tours
  • Secrets of Chapel Street & Greengate Park
  • EXCLUSIVE: Ordsall Hall and Manchester Ship Canal tour
  • Secrets of Worsley
  • Stockport Secrets
  • Secrets of Littleborough
  • April Fool's Day Tour - The Incredibly Serious Tour
  • Secrets of Cheadle
  • Secrets of Fairfield Moravian Settlement
  • The Pan-African Congress, Slavery, and Thomas Clarkson Tour: A Manchester Anniversary Tour
  • The Death & Beer Tour 2022
  • Secrets of Rochdale town centre
  • Secret Tunnels Tour
  • Magical Manchester Mystery Tour - by bike
  • Peterloo Massacre: The Reality & The Drama
  • Castlefield, St Johns, First Street
  • The Secrets of Middleton
  • The Day The World Got Smaller Tour
  • Talk: Lost Buildings of Manchester & Salford
  • Platt Fields, Birch Fields and Rusholme Tour
  • The Prestwich Tour: The surprising Manchester series
  • Some tours
  • The Zoom Tours series
  • Loyalty card/scheme
  • First Wednesday Spinningfields Series 2020
  • Exclusive: 35 King St & Georgian Manchester
  • Secrets of the University of Manchester with interior visits
  • 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
  • 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

The Peterloo Massacre Walk - The Drama & The Reality

10.30am Saturday 16 August 2025
​

Two hundred and five 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
​
Book now with CultureHosts

​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.
Fifteen people died on the day and more than 600 were injured. One man survived because he’d put his lunch, a large lump of Lancashire cheese, under his hat and when the sabre fell it stuck in the cheese. 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!’
Proudly powered by Weebly