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This Week’s Walks & Tours (Mon 4-Sun 10 June)

Tear yourself away from those street parties and come on our Jubilee canal cruise. It’s on the Manchester Ship Canal and local waterways, not the Thames, so we won’t get caught up in the royal flotilla. The cruise is on Tuesday 5th at 2pm. Booking only through www.quaytickets.com, but hurry, as tickets are going fast. (Something to do with the chocolates and champagne). Plenty more cruises to come though.

On the Bank Holiday Monday evening (4 June) John Alker is taking the Town Hall tour. Wed 6 sees Ed Glinert conducting a “Made in Manchester” extravaganza, celebrating the city’s technological and industrial achievements – cars, planes, trains and strange machines; MOSI at 2.30pm. At 6pm that evening he’ll be at Victoria Station wallmap for the regular Angel Meadow sojourn. This is a jaw-dropping trip through the horrors of the Victorian slum, including its cholera corners, finishing for a much-needed pint in the Marble Arch pub on the corner of the meadow.

John Alker has his usual two walks on the Thursday – Manchester Uncovered at 11am from the Visitor Centre and a history of Manchester theatre at 1.30pm (meet outside that theatre of consumer capitalism, Harvey Nichols). Thursday is packed with choice because Ed is doing the history of Coronation Street, packed with great anecdotes and stories (but no visit to the set, alas) at 11am from the Midland Hotel. He is also following in the steps of Charles Dickens at 2pm on Thursday (co-promoted by the Portico Library, whose Dickens  exhibition begins soon), leaving from the Visitor Centre.

Fri 8 June begins with a tour of Chetham’s Library and Manchester Cathedral at 10.30am, meeting Victoria station. This is packed with absorbing detail about the two oldest buildings in Manchester. No one else comes close to relating the story of these two great mediaeval buildings.

John is telling the story of Factory Records and the Manchester music scene at 1pm (Visitor Centre) which means a trip to Dry Bar, the Free Trade Hall (where the Sex Pistols invented modern Manchester music) and what’s left of the Hacienda. Steve Bourne begins his city safari of Manchester wildlife at 4pm from Victoria station wallmap.

Saturday 9th is one of our Underground Manchester days. Tickets are going fast for what has become the best attended walking tour in the country (apart from London Walks’s jack the Ripper extravaganza). There are a number of departures throughout the day and admission has to be booked through www.quaytickets.com. Visitors to Manchester can go on the 12 noon “This Is Manchester” tour, the best possible introduction to the city, complete with pub stop break half way.

Sunday 10th June includes a Salford/Spinningfields stroll, starting at 1pm from the bar of the delectable King’s Arms on Bloom Street, Salford (2 min walk from Salford station). Stories of Old Salford, new Spinningfields, Norman Foster buildings and George Best’s favourite drinking hole. That’s at 1pm. By then though you might be on Steve Bourne’s peregrination around the dark morass of Lindow Moss – if you get to Wilmslow station by 11am. It’s a long one, so prepare accordingly!

Remember, all our usual walks (not Underground though) cost £5 – unmatchable value!

Le Corbusier’s Manchester

Next tour: to be decided.

Meet: Visitor Information Centre, Piccadilly Plaza.

The two most powerful influences on the look of the 20th century were Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, the latter better known as Le Corbusier. The American Wright believed in working in harmony with nature, brilliantly seen in Fallingwater, the rural retreat he created for the Kaufmann family in the Pennsylvanian countryside, and less eloquently realised in a thousand Tesco supermarkets with their low roofs and over-hanging eaves.

Corbu, who was Swiss, wanted to ignore nature. If trees, rivers, hills were in the way, flatten them, destroy them, remove them. As the River Medlock was in the way of the new post-war extensions for UMIST, it had to be buried underground.

Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture of 1921 was the most influential architectural work of the 20th century. It transformed the world in advocating skyscraper cities, free use of raw concrete and buildings standing on slender columns (pilotis) elevating them off the ground so as not to waste the space at the bottom.

Le C never came to Manchester but the city was partly rebuilt according to his universal vision after the War. The plans that poured out of the Town Hall and architects’ offices in the 1940s and ’50s advocated 60-story steel skyscrapers segregating the city into superconcrete sectors.

This tour, probably the most ambitious in the New Manchester Walks roster, examines the new Manchester of the second half of the 20th century that began to partly appear courtesy of a school of architects who had drunk at the Le Corbusier table throughout their professional careers.

Did it work? What has it left us? We begin at the Visitor Centre, set in the shadow of City Tower, a 1960s block designed by Covell Matthews & Partners as a tribute to Le Corbusier’s United Nations Building in New York.

The United Nations Building in New York or Manchester’s City Tower? He’ll know (below).

Manchester in the 1930s

Alderley Edge

Lindow Moss

Macclesfield

Marple

Rusholme

Nostalgia for Old Manchester

Secret History of Manchester