Radical Walking Tour of Manchester

Manchester Cathedral, once dominated by the city’s elites, discover how this medieval church sat at the heart of a rapidly industrialising town where wealth, power and poverty collided.

Step inside Chetham’s Library, the oldest public library in the country, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels studied Manchester’s slums and began shaping ideas that would fuel revolutionary movements.

Visit the Corn Exchange, once a bustling hub for grain traders and fiery Anti–Corn Law League meetings, and learn how struggles over food prices, free trade and working‑class survival shaped Victorian Manchester before the building’s reinvention as today’s dining arcade.

Admire the Royal Exchange, a grand Victorian symbol of Manchester's commercial might, and uncover its radical underbelly where merchants debated free trade radicals rallied against exploitation in the world's first industrial city.

Explore the Arndale Centre, Europe’s largest shopping mall when opened in 1972, and uncover displaced communities, gentrification and the devastating 1996 IRA bombing that tested Manchester’s resilience and led to its regeneration.

Piccadilly Gardens, a bustling city-centre public space reborn from clay pits and a former Royal Infirmary site.

Visit Manchester Art Gallery, born from the elite Royal Manchester Institution in 1823 and later a flashpoint for suffragettes who damaged artwork in 1913 to demand votes for women.

Reflect in Sackville Gardens, a serene city oasis created in 1900 amid industrial decay, now home to memorials for Alan Turing, trans lives and HIV/AIDS victims—stand where Manchester’s defiant queer community turned prejudice into Pride and progress.

Stand in St Peter’s Square, formerly St Peter’s Field and site of the 1819 Peterloo Massacre where 60,000 peaceful reformers demanding democratic rights were sabred by cavalry—killing 18 and injuring hundreds in a bloody clash that ignited the working class fight for representation ntation.

Pause before the striking bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in St Peter’s Square—known as ‘Rise up, Women’ or ‘Our Emmeline’—and learn how this fearless Manchester-born leader ignited militant protests, hunger strikes and global campaigns that shattered barriers to women’s suffrage.