Jonathan Schofield Manchester Tours
  • HOME
  • Calendar of tours
  • The Zoom Tours series
  • Gift Vouchers
  • December seven day city centre series
  • Tour Diary: Confessions of a guide
  • Every tour in pictures and some words
  • Ghost tours - spooks guaranteed
  • Exclusive: 35 King St & Georgian Manchester
  • EXCLUSIVE: Mayfield Station tours
  • Heaton Hall and Park Tour
  • The Pan-African Congress, Slavery, and Thomas Clarkson Tour: A Manchester Anniversary Tour
  • Suffragettes, Women & Manchester
  • Totally Manchester - a general tour of the city
  • Whalley Range & Alexandra Park
  • EXCLUSIVE: Refuge/ Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel
  • EXCLUSIVE: 'Boldest Building' Tour, Edgar Wood Centre
  • Secret Tunnels Tour
  • Some tours
  • Loyalty card/scheme
  • GUEST COMMENTS
  • CONTACT DETAILS AND BIOGRAPHY
  • Terms & Conditions
  • EXCLUSIVE: Chetham's Library and College House
  • EXCLUSIVE Hallé St Peter’s & Ancoats Tour NEW
  • Manchester books by Jonathan Schofield
  • The Death & Beer Tour for the Not Quite Light Festival
  • First Wednesday Spinningfields Series 2020
  • Oxford Road Corridor/ University district tour
  • Architecture & Planning: why does Manchester look like it does?
  • Castlefield & Britannia Basin
  • Didsbury, Kersal, Quays tours
  • Bombed & Besieged: Manchester at War
  • The Prestwich Tour: The surprising Manchester series
  • Some Published Articles On Manchester's Present, its Heritage and Tourism
  • The Northern Quarter & Ancoats Tour
  • Friedrich Engels And Karl Marx Tours
  • ​Chorlton tour
  • The Rollicking Pub Tour
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Old Trafford
  • The Surprising Manchester Series: Bradford & Clayton
  • EXCLUSIVE: Kampus tours, the abandoned warehouses
  • Magical Manchester Mystery Tour - by bike
  • Incredible Interiors
  • Chapel Street and The Irwell: The Tour
  • The Tour of Uninteresting Objects
  • Shock, Surprise, Prose & Verse: Manchester and Literature
  • April Fool's Day Tour - The Incredibly Serious Tour
  • Ford Madox Brown and Pre-Raphaelite Manchester
  • The Day The World Got Smaller Tour
  • Platt Fields, Birch Fields and Rusholme Tour
  • Podcasts
  • Peterloo Massacre: The Reality & The Drama
  • Lost Graveyards and the Dead
  • Truly Madly Brutal
  • The Impossible Bridge and the Improbable Hill - River Irk Valley
  • Return to 1421: The Old Towne and Medieval Manchester
  • City of Science Tours July 2016
  • Suggested Private Tours
  • The River at Dusk - Friday 18 May
  • Literary Manchester: A city in words
  • 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
  • Manchester Statues, 20 July
  • The Gallery
  • Irk Valley Tour. Sweet Air, Scuttlers, Lost Churches and Hidden Stories
  • Tours deals 2 for £20, 3 for £30
  • The Ghosts of Afflecks & the Northern Quarter

Sandwich job

16/5/2010

7 Comments

 
You sometimes wonder about the paths which life takes you along. When I was eighteen dreaming about changing the world, did I ever think I'd one day be judging the Stockport Sandwich Competition?

This happened on Saturday. I was invited as the editor of Manchester Confidential. There were 26 entries, veggie and meat in Stockport Market. About 16 were inedible. Two were the scrapings from a sewer.

The two winners were from the same shop.

Favourite moment was when a passerby asked if he could have 'that meat one'. Help yourself I said. "Great," he said, "I've not had meat for two days."

The Stockport broadcast media were represented by two lovely old chaps, one in a wheelchair and one with a Santa beard. They were going to do a community blog interviewing me. The wheelchair guy was the straight act, trying to wrestle the interview back from the cheery chappie with the beard. Sweet.
7 Comments

Busy two weeks

15/5/2010

0 Comments

 
Oh lord where to begin. Architecture tours. Tunnel tours. Coaching my son's team to glorious Cup Final victory. Eating. Drinking. Staying up for the Election results in the Town Hall. Wondering how time doth fly by too quickly. Buying a new bicycle which seems mysteriously to be largely pink. Saving a bee just now with cup and paper from the kitchen. Contemplating my diary. One morning I took out twelve Swedes from their government. One reminded me that he'd been on my tour in 2005. It was the day of the General Election, we were doing a coach tour. I asked if they wanted to watch me vote, so all these Swedes had trooped into St John's Church Hall and watched me do my stuff. The locals looked on bemused. The Swedes had looked like UN observers. Curious how I'd completely forgotten that.

Last Friday I took out Grant Thornton accountants on a pub walk. One girl, of maybe 23, said, "I never come into old pubs like this. They can be really fun can't they?" Yes, love, they bloody well can. You can talk, drink great local beer and eat decent food. We went into a couple of great central Salford pubs, The Kings Arms and The Black Lion.

Then on the Saturday it was Manchester Confidential readers on an architecture tour for a whole afternoon with a meal at the Mark Addy. We were looking at Modern Architecture in the city or rather architecture from Modernism onwards. We all ended up in the appropriately named Modern drinking cocktails. Or rather wine in my case.

On Sunday it was the Tunnel Tours under the Great Northern in town. Around 300 people with four guides which I'd coordinated.  The primal scream therapy we introduce briefly in the tunnels is a right laugh.

Mind you we get some odd enquiries as guides. This is me writing in my Sleuth persona on ManchesterConfidential.com.

'Confidential has been doing tours of the tunnels under Manchester for readers. Sleuth got this email from one the other day. 'Will it be dark?' they wrote. 'Hope so,' replied Sleuth. There was a pause in communication for an hour or so, then the same person wrote again. 'Will the tunnels be underground?' 'Preferably,' replied Sleuth. Intriguing notion though - overground tunnels. 'Are there many tunnels in the city?' people might ask. 'Yes,' locals could reply and point down Market Street or Deansgate, 'we have one of the most extensive networks of overground tunnels in the country, although these are also called streets.'
0 Comments

    Archives

    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