IT’S NEARLY a decade since a Guardian interviewer dubbed Jonathan Schofield a ‘radical historian’. As a fellow hack all these years I’ve constantly, and I expect irritatingly, addressed him as Radical, but it wasn’t until I lost my on-tour-with-Schofield virginity that I truly grasped the obsession that makes the doyen of Manchester Blue Badge guides lead gaggles of Norwegians and corporate day-trippers around the city centre – and it’s not just the inevitable pub at the end of the traipse.

Such glorious digressions are what makes this whole Manchester MIF wander so memorable

It’s a political agenda, preached with cheeky wit and unmatched knowledge of a city he’s clearly besotted with.

So alongside the Free Traders, suffragettes, scientific geniuses and innovative architects he lauds along the way there intrude contemporary issues – the monopoly Labour Council getting into devolutionary bed with Tory central government and the controversy around the £3.5m glassing in of Library Walk (which I rather like, just as my Socialist tendencies rub against JS’s description of Free Trade and Liberalism. We share a love of pubs, mind).

That yellowing Grauniad interview took place in Chetham’s Library, where Marx and Engels chin-wagged and alchemist Dr Dee necromanced – and that shrine to radicalism is the Banquo at the table in our guide’s inaugural itinerary on behalf of the MIF. We start at the Town Hall, take in the Central Library, St Ann’s graveyard, the Royal Exchange, the Barton Arcade Undercroft (for a spooky Dr Dee reading in the dark) and finally, Manchester Cathedral, but the spectre of Chet’s is always manifest (sic). 

It was a searingly hot afternoon and any 90 minute tour, essentially a Manchester primer, is a constrained ramble, but I was astonished afterwards how much intellectual and anecdotal ground we had covered. One of the party, specifically up from London for MIF, described it as ‘quite brilliant’. The rest of the 20-strong group was made up of Mancs wanting to know about their home town and a couple of visiting Spaniards, who looked cheerily bemused.  

So much then for the the first two components of the walk brief – Radicals and Pioneers, meant to link to the festival’s own aspirations in those directions. Rabbit Holes? The element of fantasy behind the facades. Our guide  constantly steers us towards the quirky, wondrous features of the city’s fabric, even leading us underground at one point. 

The specific Rabbit Holes reference ties in with wonder.land at The Palace Theatre, an update of the Lewis Carroll classic. Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, was born in Daresbury near Warrington, but our guide points out there are Manchester connections to Alice in Wonderland. We have halted near The Wellington Inn in The Shambles. The characters Tweedledum and Tweedledee first appeared in a poem by polymath John Byrom, who was born in the pub... and also invented a system of shorthand. 

Schofield giving extra value there, as throughout, and his voice rises above the bedlam that is Friday tea-time swigging in the pen outside Sinclair’s Oyster House to recount the story of a 19th century customer there known as Lady Spittlewick. She wolfed 40 oysters every day until she choked to death on a pearl.

Such glorious digressions are what makes this whole Manchester MIF wander so memorable. There’s a feast of such stuff in his new My Guide to Manchester (Mcr Books, £9.99). Yes, he does plug it throughout the tour but, trust me, it’s a more enjoyable read than anti-Corn Law pamphlets or the Communist Manifesto.

A Manchester Walking Tour –‘Radicals, Pioneers and Rabbit Holes’ runs until July 19, at 3pm, every day except Monday and Tuesday. Meet at the Albert Memorial, Festival Square. Tickets £10, sold out but as the event develops more may become available. Check here.

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