- Visit/Tour
- History
- Manchester
- 24 September 2026
‘Refugees Welcome! Manchester: The City of Immigration…’
A guided walk through Manchester’s immigration history.
24 September 2026
6:00pm - 8:00pm
Meeting Place: Lit & Phil’s 20th Century HQ,
36, George Street, Chinatown.
£15.00
Overview
Manchester has a long and honourable tradition of welcoming people from around the world – refugees, immigrants, visitors, tourists. This has included Irish, Jews, Italians, Indians, Chinese, Germans …
The city has always welcomed those from afar, echoing the words of Pericles, the enlightened 5th century BC ruler of Athens, who proclaimed: “We throw our city open to all, and never, by the expulsion of strangers, exclude anyone from either learning or observing things”.
This is a tour of the locations where the history of immigration has been made and includes:
• The Free Trade Hall where Paul Robeson, the great American radical activist, spoke on a number of occasions.
• The Chinese Arch on Faulkner Street
• The Midland Hotel where Winston Churchill made his famous “aliens” speech.
• The Little Ireland plaque near Oxford Road station.
• The Dancehouse where Jomo Kenyatta, later first president of Kenya, taught African tribal dance in the 1940s.
• Chorlton-on-Medlock Town Hall which hosted the 5th Pan-African Congress in 1945, the 80th anniversary of which was recently celebrated.
Tour led by Ed Glinert of New Manchester Walks, author of the epic history “Manchester: The Biography”.
Meeting Place
Starts at 6 p.m. outside the site of the Lit & Phil’s 20th Century HQ, 36, George Street, Chinatown.
Ed Glinert
Ed Glinert is one of the country’s most prolific tour guides, who has completed some 5,000 tours in the Manchester area. He is an expert in Manchester history whose research has uncovered a number of inconsistencies regarding accepted stories about the city, including the origins of the name “Manchester”, the reasons behind the choice of a slave ship and the purpose of the three stripes on the city’s coat of arms, whether or not Rolls and Royce did indeed meet at the Midland Hotel, why the pillar box on Corporation Street is NOT the one that survived the 1996 bomb, and where Marx and Engels really did write The Communist Manifesto.
He has been a journalist since 1981, most notably on Private Eye in the 1990s. He is a much-published author with books for Penguin, HarperCollins, Bloomsbury and other major names. His Manchester Compendium (Penguin, 2008), a street-by-street, building-by-building guide to the city, is due to be joined in November by Manchester: The Biography, the first ever epic, detailed history of the city – from pre-Roman times till today. Glinert is also an Arts Society lecturer and a cruise ships speaker.