Jonathan Schofield Tours

Name: Jonathan Schofield Tours
Address: Greater Manchester, GB
Telephone: +447876235638
Price range: $
Rating: 4.5

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Jonathan Schofield Tours

Jonathan Schofield has been a registered Blue Badge Guide since 1996 and offers a wide variety of tours in this great city

Jonathan Schofield has been a registered Blue Badge Guide since 1996 and is the Editor-at-Large of Manchester Confidential (www.manchesterconfidential.com) the city’s largest independent magazine. He is also the Editor of Manchester Books Limited (www.mcrbooks.co.uk) and has written several books on the North West. He is a regular broadcaster on local and national radio recently appearing on Melvyn Bragg’s The Matter of the North on Radio 4

04/01/2025

Gnomes meet rowers, swan rests on bridge, the BBC’s Quay House and oh

02/01/2025

Blue, tall, spider crane and black

23/12/2024

Perfect Christmas present before Christmas via email, up to 8pm Christmas Eve? What about Manchester and NW gift vouchers for guided tours? 40 themes, more than 90 tour dates, 13 new tours - more than any other operator. ‘The highlight of my trip was definitely spending the morning with Jonathan Schofield’s walking tour.’ Tanya Robinson, travel designer, December 2024. Book here: https://jonathanschofieldtours.com/vouchers—deals.html

20/12/2024

Outstanding food and service yesterday . Thanks to Liam and the other staff and chef Shaun Moffat for a lovely birthday occasion for my son Oliver. The sea trout and tuna hash were exceptional, in fact all the food was.

12/12/2024

Perfect Christmas present? What about Manchester and NW gift vouchers for guided tours? 40 themes, more than 90 tour dates, 13 new tours - more than any other operator. ‘The highlight of my trip was definitely spending the morning with Jonathan Schofield’s walking tour.’ Tanya Robinson, travel designer, December 2024. Book here:
jonathanschofieldtours.com/vouchers—deal…

06/12/2024

Afflecks lives in the heart of everyone who’s lived or visited Mcr from 1982 onwards. This lovely memento & perfect present from features lovely photographs from & loads of interviews with folk such as Rowetta, Peter Hook, Mike Joyce, Sophie Willan, Lemn Sissay and Leo B Stanley with the true story behind that ‘8th Day’ t-shirt. You can buy it here: https://www.mcrbooks.co.uk/products/afflecks-40th-anniversary-book

05/12/2024

Love the Arts and Crafts Movement? Did you know Manchester was one of its centres? This new book from Manchester Books Limited proves it in a most magnificent and colourful way with great writing, images and design. You can get here https://www.mcrbooks.co.uk/products/the-northern-art-workers-guild-and-the-arts-and-crafts-movement-in-manchester

04/12/2024

2025 Mcr tour programme plus Christmas deals

Forty tour themes, more than ninety tour dates. Thirteen new tours are completely reworked ones, in bold below, tours in alphabetical order.

Altrincham, Ancoats & New Islington, Angel Meadow, Architecture, Alexandra Park, Bombed & Besiged, Brutalist architecture, Chapel Street, Chethams, Chorlton, Didsbury, Engels & Marx, Gorton Monastery, Halloween, Heaton Hall, Imagined Manchester Talk, Kimpton Clock Tower Hotel, Knutsford, Literary Manchester, Liverpool, Manchester Cathedral, Mighty Manchester, Music, Mystery Bike Tour, New Year’s Day, Northern Quarter, Old Trafford, Pan-African & Slavery, Pubs, Railway Age starts, Rochdale, Salford Lads Club, Sleazy & Sinister Manchester, Southern Cemetery, Strangeways & Cheetham Hill, Stockport, Suffragettes, Uninteresting Objects, University, Wilmslow, Worsley

Book the tours here: https://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/calendar-of-tours.html

The perfect present: gift vouchers?

BUT: Here’s a Christmas deal. The usual 8 tours for the price of 6, instead of £90 it’s now £75 until Boxing Day. So it will be EIGHT tours for the price of FIVE. This deal will last until Sunday 15 December.

29/11/2024

A beautiful book for Christmas? Something about the impact of the North and Manchester in the arts? A beautifully illustrated book, a beautifully designed and written book? What about a book about the arts and crafts and The Northern Art Workers’ Guild? This beauty is written by Barry Clark, Stephanie Boydell and Richard Fletcher. It will make for a wonderful Christmas present. mcrbooks.co.uk/products/the-n…

25/11/2024

The Engels and Marx PUB Tour. 6pm Thursday 28 Nov 2024. It's Friedrich Engels' birthday bonanza: he's 204. Fascinating and fun over a couple of hours. £15.

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were the fathers of communism. Engels lived, on and off, for 22 years in Manchester and during this time Marx would stay with Engels for long periods. The city appeared in the 1840s to confirm for both of them the truth behind their ideas of how society was ordered and where it was inevitably headed. It seemed clear to them how the tensions being created in this new industrial society between 'bourgeoisie' and 'proletariat' was creating such overwhelming pressure a crisis must come leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus on to full communism.

It would probably not be clear to them that present commemorations in Greater Manchester would include a climbing wall in the shape of the beard and face of Engels. Still, the fact they filtered their ideas as young men through the experience of Manchester was crucial. As the well-known historian Asa Briggs wrote in Victorian Cities, ‘If Engels had lived not in Manchester...his conception of class and his theories of the role of class might have been very different. In this case Marx might have been not a communist but a currency reformer. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age in the 1840s was of central importance in modern world history.’

There are two tours in November, the first, a walking tour through the city on Saturday 25 November, visiting the places that Engels would have been familiar with. The second is on the actual occasion of his birthday, 28 November, in the evening, in pubs. Engels and Marx were very clubable men.

Book here: https://jonathanschofieldtours.com/friedrich-engels-and-karl-marx-tours.html

22/11/2024

Larnaca, Cyprus, on Wednesday and I’ll make no bones about the fact I saw some old bones. When Lazarus popped his clogs Jesus realised there was an opportunity to show his divinity but not before sobbing when Lazarus’s sis said she believed in Christ as the Messiah whatever happened with his resurrectioning. In the St John Gospel at this point there’s the simple words: ‘Jesus wept’.

So he brought Lazarus back to life after four days by which time he’d begun to stink hence pictures of the incident have people holding their noses, such as this one by Duccio. Lazarus then had to flee the Roman province of Judea as people were out to get him to disprove the tale.

According to tradition he ended up in Cyprus, then called Kition. Some say he swam, yes it gets more and more believable. He became the archbishop in Larnaca and was a right old misery guts. It’s said Lazarus never smiled during the thirty years after his resurrection, worried by the sight of unredeemed souls he had seen during his four-day stay in Hell. The only exception was, when he saw someone stealing a pot, he smilingly said, “The clay steals the clay.”

It seems hardly worth raising him from the dead if that was his attitude. Jeeeezus wept.

Anyway here are some of his bones in a reliquary in the Church of Lazarus. There are some more in Marseille too and also in various other places. In death part two Lazarus pops up all over the show.
.shepherd .visitcyprus

18/11/2024

The great and the gourd. Enjoying a trip around Cyprus with it all going on, charming hosts (more about them later) and one slightly berserk one, great food including smoked goat, some lovely wines including a blue one (yes blue), incredible ‘small spoons’, roses, roses, everywhere and for everything, autumn scenery, plunging valleys, tall mountains, terraces on the sides of hills, great companions, a gorgeous almost 1,000 year old monastery, zivania and more zivania, lice exterminator zivania by-products and, of course gourds...ah dear gourds you are my new favourite absurd word, you are the Swiss Army knife of fruit, so insanely gourd. I’m not going to stop punning on gourds for a week. It’s a promise. .visitcyprus .shepherd

12/11/2024

Upon reflection this was dramatic this morning

11/11/2024

On Wednesday I was in London. I had a tour round the Barbican in London. I’d only been once before and that was years ago. Strange place, a forty acre mainly 1970s rambling concrete jungle from Chamberlin, Powell and Bon which despite its monstrous character is strangely beguiling. We had a fine guide, Oliver, to help us understand the place. The water features and the way St Giles Church and some of the remains of the wall that once surrounded London are incorporated works well. Texturing the concrete with drills must have been the most terribly back breaking work.

25/10/2024

Ely Cathedral is my new favourite cathedral in the world. It’s a wonder with the biggest wonder of all, the Octagon, an astonishing 14th century work of art mingled with astounding civil engineering. The tour to the top of the Octagon and over the roof is one of the best little trips I’ve taken in yonks. Thanks to Patsy our gracious and knowledgeable guide.

06/10/2024

Lyon is a wonderful place. Thanks to Lauranne and family for hosting my son, his mother and me. The food was great and I thought I’d go thoroughly local with bone marrow, tripe, snails and sweetbreads. Every visit to another city inspires a desire for change in your own, in this instance over wayfinding and storyboards revealing the city’s history. I know someone who could write these as well.

28/09/2024

Beverley is a beautiful town in the East Riding of Yorkshire with a stunning cathedral-scale minster. There’s more beauty down at Spurn Head, the long, sea-battered tail of Yorkshire separating the North Sea from the Humber estuary and rich with birdlife, battered WWII defences and that particular haunting and melancholy atmosphere of the flat east coast of England.

Larkin’s lines in the poem ‘Here’ captures that quality perfectly: ‘Here silence stands/ Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,/ Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,/ Luminously-peopled air ascends;/ And past the poppies bluish neutral distance/ Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach/ Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence/ Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.’

Address

Greater Manchester

Telephone

+447876235638

Website

http://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/

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Videos

Kalopanayiotis and the lovely Monastery of St John dating back in parts to the 11th century. Oh and outside the locals are about to copy the elegance of the Piccadilly Christmas markets in Manchester. On a wonderful trip organised by the Cyprus Ministry of Tourism. @cyprustourism #

Winter’s automata of a guardsman, a British tar and Father Time ringing bells in Stockport. The premises are now the excellent Alfredo’s Social #alfredossocial but were originally built as a jeweller’s shop. This was taken on Saturday’s tour of the town. The next tour is in November. Book: https://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/stockport-secrets.html

Two charming & delightfully eccentric literary places encounted on my Californian trip. The first in tiny Moss Landing near Monterey: The Shakespeare Society of America run by lovely Terry Taylor. The place is chock-full with memorabilia, props, costumes, models, busts, everything you can imagine Bard-connected. @VisitCA shakespeareamerica.org

Southern Cemetery tour finishes at the grave of the magnificent Polish poet Maria Pawlikowska Jasnorzewska Hey, fellas, are you living up to this? ‘WHOEVER WANTS ME TO LOVE HIM’ Whoever wants me to love him must never look gloomy, understand, and he must be able to lift me up high in the palm of his hand. Whoever wants me to love him must know how to sit on a bench for hours and contemplate the little worms and leaves of grass and flowers. And he must know how to yawn when the funeral plods by in the street and the crowds in the procession piously shuffle and bleat. Instead when, say, a cuckoo calls he must know how to be moved, or when a woodpecker pecks fiercely at a silver beech in the wood. He must know how to stroke a dog and to give me a caress and how to laugh and live in his dreams, deep, sweet and meaningless, and stay quiet in the blissful darkness and know nothing, just like me, and as for goodness and badness, stray from them equally. @McrLitFest @mcrconfidential @bbcmancsports