Jonathan Schofield Manchester Tours
  • HOME
  • Calendar of tours
  • GUEST COMMENTS
  • Every tour in pictures and some words
  • Manchester books by Jonathan Schofield
  • Terms & Conditions
  • CONTACT DETAILS AND BIOGRAPHY
  • VOUCHERS & DEALS
  • 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

Workers of the world...come to Manchester

21/2/2013

3 Comments

 
Picture
STRETCHING the mind is always good, exercising the grey matter and all that. 
The Human Geography department of the University of Manchester has been hosting around  twenty PhD fellows from all over Europe. Politics is one of the themes so I was commissioned to do a Radical History tour of Manchester. The idea was to hang the tour off Friedrich Engels' time in Manchester and his association with Karl Marx. 

The group were fabulous to take around, full of questions which challenged my knowledge, but for that reason made the tour more special and memorable. Thanks to the lady with the memorable name Julie de los Reyes (first row, left of centre above, with the white cuffs on her coat) for hiring me. Doesn't her name translate as Julie of the Kings? Wow. 

It was a polyglot group although I was monoglot and guided just in English. There were Germans, French, Italians, Greeks, Spanish, Turkish, Chileans, Columbians - I lost count of  the number of nationalities represented on the tour. 

After meeting at the National Football Museum and visiting the Royal Exchange, we finished up at the Joseph Brotherton statue by the Irwell in Salford. I'd focussed on Engels, but brought in a range of other themes including anti-slavery Thomas Clarkson's visit to Manchester in 1787, the vegetarian movement, Free Trade and much else. 

By Brotherton though we were all freezing. It was about minus two.

I suggested we finished off in the Kings Arms, just down the road. 

One or two of the guests got excited the pub is owned by ex-House Martins/Beautiful South leader Paul Heaton. They also got excited by the beer and dived into the smorgasbord of English ales like people in a desert slating their thirst. 

There were some interesting discussions after I'd finished presenting with various members of the group. One Greek fella was forthright about his country's problems and how public protest is necessary. His friend described how power in the country is divided between certain key families who crop up behind so much of Greek civic life.

My defence of the first-past-the-post system at General Elections surprised some of the guests but maybe they understood the point about the British system;  that despite its failings it prevents extremist parties gaining any foothold in Parliament. 

In  a room of optimists, and thus left of centre with politics, we all agreed with the Engels' passage I concluded with from The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1844):

'When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder.  

'But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission.  

'But murder it remains.'


Astonishingly Engels was not even 25 years old when he wrote those words.

3 Comments

Top down Malaysian Mancunian Meander

20/2/2013

2 Comments

 
Picture
JUST about the absolute best thing about guiding is visiting other countries in reverse. You get to learn about nations through the people visiting your city rather than tramping the streets of, in this case, Kuala Lumpur.

Of course I'd love to go to KL (as the Malaysians say) but having the locals over  in Manchester is the closest I'm going to get any time soon.

On this trip there were twelve or so Malaysians from a property development company. Every six months apparently they scoot off around the world for twenty days or so to see what's going on elsewhere. I think they may be a successful company.

Having been in Liverpool, the English-speaking group arrived in Manchester and immediately wanted to visit the university shops to get some University of Manchester memorabilia. Apparently a lot of them are or were - I think I missed something in translation here - academics. They seemed impressed by the University's 25 Nobel prizes (that's more Nobels than any nation in the world but for seven).

After the University we toured around the city in the coach. As we passed Manchester Central, the boss called out that he wanted to take pictures of the railway station. The coach almost had to crash through buildings to take the corner down Museum Street.

We then took pictures of Beetham Tower and the Bridgewater Hall. One of the guests asked if we might visit Ian Simpson's apartment at the top of Beetham Tower. "What now?" I said. "I think I might have to ask first."

I was beginning to notice a very distinct hierarchy among the group. 

The boss was definitely THE BOSS. 

He had to be the one who led the group off after stops, he had to generally be at the front and when he stopped, the group stopped. I explained on King Street why one of the sixties buildings (the old Nat West) was black in shade with tooled Swedish granite. The boss took a picture of a section of the wall and so did the rest of the group. I wonder what make of that picture when they go home?

Later the coach drivers told me that there's always a bit of fuss at the hotels where they stay because rooms have to be swapped so the main man can have the highest room in the hotel of the group. 

Most of the time, apparently, the boss talks to his secretary when he wants something sorting, who then talks to the tour manager who then has to talk to the secretary who talks to the boss. They cut in the middle man.

By the way as the picture above shows, with the boss flailing his arms around as I took the photo, he was a very distinctive character. Extrovert. His blue corduroy trousers had little stars embroidered in.
2 Comments

Massive tour and dirty feet in the dark

19/2/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
BIG group on the Manchester Tunnel Tour last Sunday. Some sort of booking mess-up meant that I had fifty on the first trip.I  must work on those booking efficiencies.

The group included a friend, Matthew Frost, who decided to pick up his friend Maria for the photo above. 

He was feeling very pleased with himself. He'd made up a joke.

"I'm on a new keep fit regime," he was telling anybody who'd listen. "I'm running up rigging, climbing along masts and jumping off gangplanks."


Then came the punchline: "It's called pi-ra-tes," he'd say. He pronounced pirates, of course, with the same number of syllables and to rhyme with pilates. It made me laugh. 

Amongst the throng there were also some fellas who'd had a few beers before coming on the tour. This meant they sprinted away at the end to find a toilet, any toilet. It's odd but sometimes people forget that two pints before an event makes the final moments of an eighty minute tour difficult. 

Still they were well-behaved despite the alcohol. 

One man, in this group and in his thirties, took off his shoes when I said the tunnels could be muddy, because, as he said "I'm too tight to get my new trainers dirty even though they weren't expensive."

Down in the tunnel, one guest, Phil Rawnsley, captured some excellent pictures. The one of the doll - a mysterious presence in the tunnel - is particularly spooky.
Picture
Picture
Worst foot forward after walking the tunnel barefoot
0 Comments

Saturday screamers are best

18/2/2013

1 Comment

 
Picture
WHEN you conduct ghost tours you want the guests to get loud. You want screams and squeals. 

You want women. 

Most men have that acting tough thing. They want to lurk at the back, saying, "As if", or "Yea, I think I know what happened there". Then they give their friends that 'I'm not being fooled by this idiot' stare.  

Male pride is laughable sometimes, laughable because it debars us fellas from enjoying ourselves as much as we could and also ensures we don't really - on something such as a ghost tour when you need to get into the mood - get value for money. 


God, don't I know how fear of losing control can stop you enjoying yourself. I gave up dancing except verbally, or with a ball at my feet, at the age of 35. I miss it.

To massively generalise (by the way guides would be lost without the ability to make sweeping statements) from my experience more women believe in ghosts than men. Maybe the stories of wise women, female intuition and the like, is all about women simply being more open-minded. Or spiritual. Or just downright superstitious. 

Anyway because women relax more; are more open to enjoying themselves on tours and not acting all gruff and sarcastic; and also often believe in 't'other side', then the best ghosts tours usually have a slight female majority. 
Or a loud female minority.

The dream scenario took place on Saturday (16 Feb). 

The two women, third and fourth from the right, in the picture above were, when we entered the dark under the Barton Arcade a glorious mess of screams and hysterical laughter. The real ghosts must have been terrified.

Anyway the squeals communicated to the rest of the group who then became more nervous about what might happen and more ready to laugh.

The result was we had an absolute ball of a tour. 

Thank you ladies. You boosted the whole occasion.

Shame you didn't win the tour prize. 

1 Comment

Ben, the Aussie journo

15/2/2013

3 Comments

 
Picture
MET Ben Groundwater (above), an Australian journalist with a great surname, on Monday 11 February. 

I gave him a tour of past, present and modern Manchester with visits inside Chetham's, John Rylands Library and The Briton's Protection.  The latter for a fine pint of ale and a general chat about what makes Manchester tick.

The rendezvous time had been 2pm so after arriving back from Washington DC at 6.15am and having had no sleep, I felt somehow otherworldly with jet lag.

Yet the guiding concentrated my mind, the discipline of public performance does that; although I confess on leaving Ben at half four fatigue set in so heavily I found myself outside the Town Hall looking up at it and wondering what on earth it was and what did it want from me? 

Ben was here researching material for various pieces including a regular blog - God I hate that word - called The Backpacker. 

He also writes for The Sydney Morning Herald and lots of other publications, a classic freelancer. Good man.

His theme on this trip was finding out places in Manchester for Aussies to go during The Rugby League World Cup this October from bars to culture - although we did wonder whilst stood outside the Bridgewater Hall whether Classical Music would really be the fans' thing.

That's another reason why we went for a pint in the Briton's Protection. Seemed more suited to the theme.

I've taken a few Sydney Morning Herald journalists around and read the paper occasionally online to see what is happening in Oz. When Australia was doing so badly at the 2012 Olympics it had been funny to read the commentators appalled lack of comprehension over how it was possible that Britain could trounce them in the medal table. 

Ben correctly pointed out we have a bit of a chip on the shoulder about Australian sport. The conversation spread to the myriad chips on sporting shoulders. For instance how frantic the Welsh and Scots are to beat the English at rugby, at anything, and that the English don't care anywhere near as much. Same with Leeds fans and their not massively returned dislike of Manchester United. 

The whale hardly cares what the minnows do after all. 

3 Comments

    Archives

    May 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    September 2020
    May 2020
    December 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    June 2015
    March 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    July 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    November 2012
    October 2011
    October 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    February 2010

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly