A walk with Martin Zero

I’m really pleased to be doing a special one-off version of my tour around the Medieval Quarter with Martin Zero, known for his YouTube channel exploring Manchester’s hidden, forgotten and hard-to-reach places.

This will follow the same street-level route as my regular Medieval Quarter walk, but with extra time for Martin to share stories, photographs and observations along the way.

We’ll begin around Hanging Ditch and Hanging Bridge, before exploring the Cathedral, Chetham’s, Long Millgate, the old schools, the Corn Exchange and the former Market Place - looking for the buildings, street names, fragments and stories that still reveal traces of Medieval and Victorian Manchester.

This special tour will be three hours rather than two, with a comfort break halfway round.

The tour is limited to 20 places, so book now…!

Further details and booking: https://www.here-then-now.tours/walking-tours-schedule/15-08-26

Your Place. Revealed

I’ve been developing Your Place Revealed, a collaborative project with local guide, writer and historian Jonathan Schofield.

The idea is simple: every building, street, pub, shop, office, hotel, school, warehouse or patch of land has a story. Some are well known, but many are hidden in old maps, archives, photographs, newspaper reports and personal memories.

Your Place Revealed is for businesses, organisations, property owners and developers who want to uncover and share the story of their place - whether that becomes a short research pack, framed reception display, website content, social media posts, hoarding artwork, a talk, or even a walking tour.

It’s a way of making history useful, visible and engaging - not just preserving the past, but helping people understand the places they use every day.

Please visit: www.yourplacerevealed.co.uk 

New walking tour: Granadaland

I’m just putting the finishing touches to Granadaland, a new walking tour around the former Granada TV studios site.

I was already touching on parts of this story during my Castlefield tour - including the old Coronation Street sets and the changing landscape around the former studios - but it always felt as though we were wandering slightly beyond Castlefield, both geographically and thematically.

And really, this small patch of Manchester deserves a tour of its own.

Within a surprisingly compact area, we’ll trace how the site has changed over time: from open land on the edge of the city, through canals, railways, warehouses and industrial infrastructure, to one of the most famous television sites in Britain.

We’ll look at the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal, Liverpool Road, Quay Street, Grape Street, the outdoor Coronation Street sets, the Granada Studios Tour, and the wider reinvention of the area around Aviva Studios, home of Factory International.

There’s also a wonderful architectural twist in the story. Granada House, the iconic modernist block on Quay Street, was designed with a possible future life as a hotel in mind - just in case the whole television experiment didn’t work out. Decades later, after Granada TV disappeared, that is almost exactly what happened.

So this is a tour about television, entertainment and memory, but also about architecture, risk, reuse and regeneration - and how one corner of Manchester went from industrial backland to a name recognised across the country.

Further details and booking: https://www.here-then-now.tours/granadaland