Garden Delights, The Prolific Cook and The Dissolute Husband

Arley Hall Gardens sit on the Cheshire plain eight miles south of Warrington, less than twenty miles from Manchester as the crow flies. It lays claim to one of the best gardens in the UK and the oldest herbaceous border in the UK from the 1840s. It also hosted one...
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Garden Delights, The Prolific Cook and The Dissolute Husband

Arley Hall Gardens sit on the Cheshire plain eight miles south of Warrington, less than twenty miles from Manchester as the crow flies. It lays claim to one of the best gardens in the UK and the oldest herbaceous border in the UK from the 1840s. It also hosted one of the most interesting eighteenth…

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Doctors, lawyers and the world turned upside down

The glorious medieval woodwork of Manchester Cathedral is from the late-1400s and is full of playful wit and satire as well as deeper messages. The...
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Manchester suffers a set

In 1945 Manchester made a plan to more or less demolish the whole city centre and start again. Only a few buildings would remain: the...
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Stargazing over Whitworth Street

The former Municipal School of Technology between Whitworth Street and Granby Row is now part of the University of Manchester and is a terracotta and...
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Reading a building and how an elegant man in flannel trousers fits in

The decoration on buildings tells a tale of how the people who paid for that building thought about themselves. The former Refuge Assurance Building is...
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Tales of the Market Place. The Fountain that ran with Wine and the Mad King.

Where New Cathedral Street presently cuts from Market Street to Exchange Square was once Manchester’s small and cute market place with its occasionally bloody history....
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Manchester all over the globe

There’s a whole network of cities, towns, homesteads and landscape features named after this city. In North America there are more places named after Manchester...
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The Manchester Ophelia sleeping in central Manchester

St John’s Gardens in the city centre off Byrom Street was formerly the site of St John’s church, finished 1769, demolished 1931. The cross says...
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Why Manchester United play at Old Trafford…oh and drunken women

Manchester United’s second ground at Bank Street, a short distance east of the present-day stadium of Manchester City, was a nightmare. It combined a terrible...
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Bob Dylan, Judas, The Buzzcocks and Take That

Many guests to the city are crazy about the music history. If they want mad range of music stories then the Free Trade Hall (now...
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Darwin’s evolution proved – in Manchester

There’s a small creature in Manchester Museum that is one of the best examples of Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. This is the...
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How to make the River Irwell appear from nowhere?

The late Dr Michael Powell, the much missed former head librarian at Chetham’s Library, used to love to surprise my guests when I took them...
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Nancy Bird, the whistling rogue from North Manchester

I was wandering around Manchester General Cemetery the other week. This is in Harpurhey, a couple of miles north of the city centre. There's something...
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pubs, music, ghosts

1pm, 3pm ,5pm

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Just a short note to thank you for the guided tour of the Mayfield depot yesterday. Having lived in the North and worked in the city for many years I thought I knew Manchester quite well, but I have to admit that I had never heard of the station at all. Until, that is, I was given a couple of your vouchers as a birthday gift and checked out your website. Both my son and I found the tour very informative and entertaining, with some great anecdotes to bring the story to life.’

Richard Jones

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Every Saturday

music, pubs, ghosts

1pm, 3pm ,5pm

Just a short note to thank you for the guided tour of the Mayfield depot yesterday. Having lived in the North and worked in the city for many years I thought I knew Manchester quite well, but I have to admit that I had never heard of the station at all. Until, that is, I was given a couple of your vouchers as a birthday gift and checked out your website. Both my son and I found the tour very informative and entertaining, with some great anecdotes to bring the story to life.’

Richard Jones

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