- Visit/Tour
- History
- Manchester
- 16 July 2026
Secrets of Manchester Architecture – Where Our Buildings Come From
A guided walking tour revealing the surprising origins of Manchester’s famous buildings
16 July 2026
6:00pm - 8:00pm
Manchester
M60 2DS
The Midland Hotel
16 Peter Street
Manchester
M60 2DS
£15.00
Overview
Manchester Town Hall, the Free Trade Hall, Midland Hotel, City Tower, the Britannia Hotel… These are some of Manchester’s best-known buildings, yet none of them can be said to be original in design. All are based, architecturally, on an existing building, mostly in Europe, but also occasionally in America, and more recently, astonishingly, from nature.
For instance:
- Manchester Town Hall resembles Ypres Cloth Hall in Belgium.
- The Athenaeum bears much similarity with the Travellers’ Club on London’s Pall Mall, and is by the same architect, Charles Barry.
- 82 King Street, a late 20th century towering office block, looks like a smaller version of the Chase Tower in Dallas.
These are not coincidences. Manchester’s leading architects, such as Thomas Worthington, Edward Walters and Charles Barry, deliberately used famous existing buildings overseas as their models to give Manchester the same status as older cities.
Ed Glinert of New Manchester Walks, author of the epic history “Manchester: The Biography” and a Riba judge, leads this tour revealing the secrets of Manchester architecture, starting from the Midland Hotel (Thomas Hamilton’s Hamilton Grand, St Andrews) to the Tower of Light (nature’s sea sponge).
Location
6pm – Tour Begins: Outside the Midland Hotel 16 Peter St, Manchester M60 2DS
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.