Here. Then. & Now

Here. Then. & Now Guided walking tours full of stories, history and hidden details, led by a local architect.

Explore the city’s constant change, from Roman and medieval origins to canals, mills and railways, through to today’s skyline.

Is this the narrowest alleyway in Manchester?This tiny passage runs between Whitworth Street West and the Rochdale Canal...
03/06/2026

Is this the narrowest alleyway in Manchester?

This tiny passage runs between Whitworth Street West and the Rochdale Canal towpath.

I only spotted it for the first time back in 2009, when I took part in something called Street Training - an art and urban practice by artist Lottie Child that encouraged people to reclaim city streets through creative, playful and sometimes slightly subversive interventions.

Rather than seeing the city only as a place of rules, risks and “do not enter” signs, Street Training treated public space as something to explore, question and use differently… but responsibly, and legally!

And with the walls this close together, it turns out you can climb surprisingly high up the sides.

Ever since, I’ve wondered why this little route exists.

It sits directly next to the apartment building by Stephenson Hamilton Risley Studio, on the site of the former yacht warehouse that later became the Haçienda.

Usually buildings either abut one another, or a passageway is clearly part of a planned route. This feels like neither. So I do wonder… was it intentional? A service gap? A boundary issue? Or did someone, somewhere, very slightly misjudge the length of the new building?!

What’s also surprising is how clear it is. No litter, no fly-tipping, no abandoned mattress. Just a narrow, almost hidden route through the city.

I love these small urban oddities. The places you can walk past for years without noticing, then suddenly they become part of your personal map of Manchester.

Rewind 150 years, and my walking tour group would have been standing outside the old Pine Apple Inn on Water Street.Toda...
31/05/2026

Rewind 150 years, and my walking tour group would have been standing outside the old Pine Apple Inn on Water Street.

Today, they’re underneath the huge Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, where the auditorium now straddles the pedestrianised section of Water Street and lands almost exactly where the pub once stood.

The pub was originally known as the Drover & Pine Apple Inn, then shortened to the Pine Apple Inn, and later written as The Pineapple.

And even the name tells a story.

A drover was someone who moved livestock, usually cattle or pigs, often over long distances. That makes perfect sense here. Just around the corner was Liverpool Road Station, the world’s first inter-city passenger railway station, but also a hugely important goods station.

This was not just a place of passengers and cotton. It was a working railway landscape of warehouses, carts, markets, animals, food supply and industry.

By the end of the 1830s, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was bringing huge numbers of pigs into the city, and there was a pig market nearby. The animal ramp at the old station still hints at this part of the story.

The “Pine Apple” part of the name probably has a different meaning. Pineapples were once rare, expensive and exotic, and became a symbol of hospitality and welcome. So the name seems to bring two ideas together: the working life of the railway district, and the old language of inns, food, drink and shelter.

I’m starting to realise that some old pub names did more than simply identify a building. They were almost little signs of belonging. They told you something about the area, the trade, and sometimes the people the pub expected through the door.

The Drover & Pine Apple feels like exactly that.

And then the name lived on.

The pub gave its name to the Pineapple Line, the railway viaduct which still runs into what is now the Science and Industry Museum. The museum describes the line as taking its name from the Georgian-period Pineapple Inn, which stood beside the viaduct on Water Street.

Later, The Pineapple became part of another Manchester story. Sitting close to Granada’s Quay Street studios, it was used by Granada staff and also appeared in Coronation Street, including scenes filmed in the 1980s. It was later demolished around 1988/89 to make way for a car park for the Granada Studios Tour.

And now the site has changed again.

From Georgian hospitality, to television history, to one of Manchester’s newest cultural venues, this small patch of Water Street has been used again and again as a place where people gather, socialise and are entertained.

All layered into the same place.

Manchester does this again and again. The city doesn’t just replace itself. It often leaves clues.

Hunting for them, and sharing them, is what I love about delivering walking tours.

This isn’t medieval Manchester.But it sits right in the middle of it.This is the interior of Manchester’s Corn Exchange,...
29/05/2026

This isn’t medieval Manchester.

But it sits right in the middle of it.

This is the interior of Manchester’s Corn Exchange, around the early 1900s, when the great trading hall was still filled with corn stands, produce tables and merchants doing business beneath that extraordinary glass roof.

The building itself is Victorian / Edwardian rather than medieval, completed in stages on the site of an earlier Corn Exchange. But market trading around here goes back much further - into the medieval heart of Manchester.

That’s one of the things I love about this part of the city. It isn’t frozen in one period. Medieval streets, Victorian ambition, post-war change, 1990s reinvention and today’s city, all sit on top of each other.

We’ll be walking through this area on my Medieval Quarter tour tomorrow (Saturday) morning at 10.30am… we’ll be looking at the Cathedral, Chetham’s, Hanging Bridge, Long Millgate, the old market place, the Corn Exchange... the hidden layers that still survive.

It’s also the last chance to use the National Walking Month discount - 25% off tickets: https://www.here-then-now.tours/walking-tours-schedule/30-05-26

I went on my second walking tour in a week led by someone else.This time it was Flavours of Manchester - a food and drin...
28/05/2026

I went on my second walking tour in a week led by someone else.

This time it was Flavours of Manchester - a food and drink tour hosted by Danny.

My own tours usually focus on how Manchester evolved into the city we see today: the streets, buildings, industries, politics and public spaces. But this got me thinking about how much food and drink also tells that story.

Some of what we sampled goes back a long way.

Boddingtons links back to the old Strangeways Brewery, founded in 1778. And the rice and three at This & That belongs to a much more recent, but equally important, Manchester story - South Asian cafés feeding workers, traders and warehouse staff in and around what is now the Northern Quarter. The Manchester Tart is usually traced back to Manchester Pudding, published by Mrs Beeton in 1861.

So food has shaped the city, just not always in the obvious architectural sense.

It’s there in the old markets. The breweries. The pubs. The warehouse cafés. The places that fed workers before they became places for office workers, residents, visitors… and people on walking tours.

But one of the more recent Manchester food stories has a slightly personal connection.

Danny introduced us to the Manchester Egg - a black pudding scotch egg made with a pickled egg inside. And my friend Ben invented it.

The idea started at The Castle Hotel on Oldham Street, after Ben’s 30th birthday in 2009. Robert Owen Brown had catered the party with his own black pudding scotch eggs - the same chef I mentioned in my recent story about the Mark Addy.

A few weeks later, Ben was sitting at the bar of The Castle, still thinking about those eggs, and wondered what would happen if you used a pickled egg instead of a normal boiled egg.

And after a few experiments, the Manchester Egg was born.

By early 2010, he was making batches for The Castle from his own home kitchen. Fast forward 16 years, and I’m being served it at the newly opened The Badger, on Danny’s walking tour.

I’m not sure the Manchester Egg has changed the physical evolution of Manchester - there isn’t a blue plaque outside The Castle. Not yet, anyway.

But it is one of those brilliant little stories that gives a place personality. A reminder that cities aren’t only shaped by big plans, major buildings and historic events. Sometimes they’re shaped by people standing at a bar, having an idea, trying something out, and somehow adding another small layer to the city.

And yes, Danny does offer a vegan alternative… a plant-based Lancashire hotpot 😊

Manchester has so many unusual street names.Some of the origins are obvious. Some are not so obvious. And some feel like...
26/05/2026

Manchester has so many unusual street names.

Some of the origins are obvious. Some are not so obvious. And some feel like little fragments of an older city, still surviving in the names we walk through today.

There’s actually a brilliant little book called Origins of Street Names in the City Centre of Manchester, which explains how some of the larger and busier streets got the names we still use today. Withy Grove, for example, comes from “withy”, an old English name for willow trees. So this street was presumably once lined with willow trees. Today, there isn’t a single tree along it.

But I’m even more interested in the smaller streets and lanes around Manchester.

Windmill Street really did have a windmill on it. It was demolished in 1811.

Concert Lane takes its name from a concert hall near the upper end of King Street. Between 1775 and 1777, Manchester’s first purpose-built theatre - the first Theatre Royal, not the later one on Peter Street - and a concert hall were built nearby. Concert Lane is the last reminder of that era.

Cheapside is another good one. It doesn’t mean “cheap” in the modern sense. “Cheap” or “chepe” was an old word connected with markets and trading, which makes sense in this part of the city.

But where did Butter Lane come from? Is it too obvious? Was there once a buttery here, or something connected with the butter trade?

And why was Rowe Street changed to Rowendale Street?

Southmill Street is another strange one. On William Green’s 1794 map, it appears to be labelled South Hill Street - so was Southmill a later correction, a mistake, or a name that simply stuck? And why, on the former Free Trade Hall stonework, is it engraved simply as South Street?

Hanging Ditch, now running alongside Exchange Square, is one of the best. Its origins are still debated, but what we do know is that people weren’t hanged here. One explanation is that it may have come from “ang”, meaning curved, with the second syllable meaning gully or ravine - so possibly a “curved gully”.

Chapel Street is another interesting one. It was named after St Andrew’s Chapel, which once stood on the corner of Mount Street. When the chapel and most of Chapel Street were cleared for the Town Hall Extension, only a short remaining section survived. Somewhere between 1908 and 1922, that leftover fragment seems to have been renamed County Street - perhaps reflecting the new civic district developing around it.

And then there are the even stranger cases.

The city council apparently reused old street signs from the Hulme Crescents to make new ones elsewhere in Manchester. Over time, the weather has started to reveal the old names beneath. On Gilbert Street in Castlefield, the name Embden Walk is now showing through - a ghost street name from Hulme, reappearing in a completely different part of the city.

Manchester’s street names are full of these little fragments: trees, mills, markets, chapels, concert halls, vanished lanes, old mistakes and names that refuse to fully disappear.

Do you know the story behind any of these? Or are there any other Manchester street names I should look into next?

Whilst on a walking tour last week, we stopped by the mural behind the People’s History Museum.But it was hard not to ke...
24/05/2026

Whilst on a walking tour last week, we stopped by the mural behind the People’s History Museum.

But it was hard not to keep looking across the river.

On the opposite bank of the Irwell, the Mark Addy is still there… closed, neglected, and oddly visible, with its sign still standing high and proud.

Having opened in 1981, it has remained closed since the Boxing Day flood in 2015. I had a peek inside myself in 2020 - it wasn’t too difficult to get in - and what I found was so sad. A familiar haunt, abandoned but still carrying traces of the place it used to be.

Seeing it again last week, got me wondering what happens next.

For anyone who remembers it, the Mark Addy was a proper Manchester institution: great food, great atmosphere, and one of the few places that really made use of the river. There were even boat trips from outside the pub up towards Old Trafford.

There’s a 2010 YouTube video (https://youtu.be/epjjW-zrtSA?si=jCGUhGHki30ikbuw) of the pub’s Executive Head Chef explaining what made this city-centre riverside pub so special - full of pride and optimism.

But the thing that made it so special was also the thing that made it so vulnerable.

The Irwell has always flooded.

That isn’t just a modern problem, although climate change and the way we manage land will almost certainly make flooding more frequent and more intense. It is part of the long history of this river and this edge of the city.

The Annals of Manchester, published in the 1830s, records a number of major floods over the centuries, including a seven-day flood in 1787 that carried away part of Salford Bridge. Dr Peter Arrowsmith’s archaeological assessment of the Medieval Cultural Quarter also quotes Aston’s 1804 description of the Irwell as “very liable to floods”, rising suddenly to a great height, with the 1616 flood apparently so high that people standing on Salford Bridge could ladle water from the river below.

Chetham’s Library, also beside the Irwell, is the oldest surviving public library in the English-speaking world partly because the flood risk was considered. It was built on the first floor specifically to protect the books from flooding. In other words, one of Manchester’s most important surviving historic places was designed with water risk in mind.

The Mark Addy feels like the opposite story.

A brilliant place, but at the wrong level. I think it was always destined to fail, at some point.

And now, on the opposite side of the river to Chetham’s, just below Cathedral Approach on Chapel Street, a new bar or restaurant appears to be taking shape on the bank of the Irwell.

I don’t know the details yet, or how flood risk has been designed for, but from the outside it looks worryingly low, not so different in level from the Mark Addy. It does make me wonder how long such a venture can realistically last.

So it’s hard not to ask the question:

Have we not learned from the river? Or are we still just enjoying the view?

The Mark Addy may have closed in modern times, but the problem that helped finish it off is much older.

The Irwell has always offered atmosphere, trade, movement and life.

But it has always demanded respect in return.

__

1980s photo: Manchester Libraries Archive

This wasn’t one of my walking tours.This was one I went on myself, yesterday, led by Hayley Flynn of Skyliner, as part o...
21/05/2026

This wasn’t one of my walking tours.

This was one I went on myself, yesterday, led by Hayley Flynn of Skyliner, as part of the Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, in partnership with GM Walks.

And honestly, I love going on other people’s walking tours.

Even in the same city. Even when they pass places I talk about on my own tours. There is always something new to learn… or a different way of looking at a place you thought you already knew.

That’s the thing about Manchester. No one tour, no one guide, and no one perspective can ever cover it all.

This walk explored Manchester’s links to transatlantic slavery, cotton, public art, monuments, memory, and how the past is still present in the city around us.

What I particularly like about Hayley’s work is her way of reading the city - critically, carefully, and with real honesty about how stories sit in public space. She had even made a dress for the tour, stitched with repeated words from an inscription in Lincoln Square.

I often hear people who live or work in Manchester say they don’t need to go on a walking tour because they already know the city.

But I’m not sure any of us ever really “know” Manchester.

There are always more layers, more stories, more connections, and different people will help you see different things.

Walking tours are all different. The places matter, of course. But so does the person telling the story: the angle they bring, the things they notice, and the way they help you see familiar streets differently.

A really thoughtful and important walk. Thank you Hayley!

Thanks also to The Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement programme, GM Moving, and everyone involved in bringing these fantastic routes together.

I absolutely love looking at old maps.There’s something fascinating about comparing the Manchester we know today with th...
20/05/2026

I absolutely love looking at old maps.

There’s something fascinating about comparing the Manchester we know today with the one that used to be there… the lost streets, old building lines, former uses, and tiny clues that explain why certain places feel the way they do.

The Goad maps are especially brilliant.

These were fire insurance plans, produced to help assess fire risk in urban buildings. But they don’t just show streets and building footprints, they often label building uses, materials and other details that help bring the historic city back to life.

In some ways, they almost feel like a Victorian version of Google Maps. Once you get your eye in, you can start recognising places that still exist today - while also spotting just how much has changed.

This extract, from August 1886, shows the area around what is now the St Michael’s development, between Bootle Street and Jackson’s Row.

The Sir Ralph Abercromby is shown, although not named as such, but clearly marked as a public house. Next door, in what later became the police headquarters, is shown as being a Fire Brigade Station.

Cutting through this block was a street called South Sea…!

This was proper industrial Manchester: dense, practical, messy, and full of places where things were made, stored, moved, sold and drunk.

That’s what I love about this particular series of maps. They don’t just show the layout of the city, they show its personality.

Compare that with the modern map, where the same area is now dominated by St Michael’s, new offices, posh restaurants, legal services, gyms, a 5-star hotel and Channel 4’s Manchester base.

Manchester’s personality has certainly changed…!!

What differences can you spot?�

Can you guess the year…?First person to guess the exact year these photos were taken gets two free tickets for one of my...
17/05/2026

Can you guess the year…?

First person to guess the exact year these photos were taken gets two free tickets for one of my Manchester walking tours in May or June.

This is St Peter’s Square, looking towards the corner of Oxford Street.

The whole block in the background would later disappear, replaced by Elisabeth House - the concrete modernist office block designed by Cruickshank & Seward. And where Boots is in this photo, many Mancunians will later remember the Dutch Pancake House.

But that building has gone too.

Elisabeth House was demolished and replaced by One St Peter’s Square, designed by Glenn Howells Architects and completed in 2014. Today, the same corner is home to KPMG’s offices, with an independent coffee shop at street level.

From Boots, to pancakes, to corporate coffee.

A lot of Manchester history in one corner.




�

Whilst doing my Introduction to Manchester walking tour yesterday, I spotted Sarah peering out from behind the window of...
16/05/2026

Whilst doing my Introduction to Manchester walking tour yesterday, I spotted Sarah peering out from behind the window of the pub she once ran.

A week or so ago, I wrote about Sarah Studd - born Sarah Townsend - the woman behind part of the story of Mr Thomas’s Chop House.

The name on the building is Thomas’s, of course. But after Thomas became too ill to work, and later died in 1880, Sarah formally took over the licence and ran what became one of Manchester’s busiest chop houses.

For International Women’s Day in 2019, Mr Thomas’s was temporarily renamed Mrs Sarah’s Chop House, honouring Sarah and her daughter, also Sarah, who later ran the business too.

And it looks like Sarah is still there.

Not quite on the main signboard now, but behind the glass… half hidden, half watching, with a slightly eerie Victorian stare.

Which made me wonder: what would Sarah have wanted?

Would she have preferred Thomas’s name to remain exactly where it is?
Would she have wanted her own name beside his?
Or would one side of the sign for Thomas, and one side for Sarah, have felt about right?

Either way, it’s a reminder that buildings don’t always tell you the whole story from the outside.

Sometimes you have to peek through the window.

—

Mr Thomas’s Chop House features in my Introduction to Manchester walking tour… one of many familiar city-centre places with a less familiar story behind it.

Upcoming dates and bookings: www.here-then-now.tours





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