Manchester keeps its history in layers: a Roman gatehouse under a railway viaduct, a medieval college beside a Victorian library, a massacre remembered on a stone slab. Three days tracing radicals, reformers and the machines that changed everything.
The reconstructed north gate and granary walls of the fort founded around AD 79 by Agricola's troops, rebuilt in stone by AD 200. The rebuilt gatehouse sits on the original line; open access, unstaffed, free year-round beneath the Victorian viaducts.
Collegiate church founded 1421 under a licence from Henry V, raised to cathedral status in 1847. The medieval quire stalls of 1508 carry Britain's finest set of misericords — 30 carvings including a man wheeling his wife in a barrow.
The English-speaking world's oldest public library, founded 1653 in a sandstone college building of 1421. Marx and Engels read together at the bay window in summer 1845; the alcove and its square table are still in place.
A timber-framed house of 1552, the last survivor of Manchester's medieval Shambles. It was jacked up 1.4 metres in 1971, then moved wholesale in 1999 after the IRA bomb — the rebuilt frame reuses the original oak.
The national museum of democracy, in a converted 1909 hydraulic pumping station on the Irwell. Four hundred trade union banners — the world's largest collection — plus Peterloo relics and the desk where the Labour Party was drafted.
Jeremy Deller's concentric stone mound of 2019 marks where cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reform campaigners on 16 August 1819, killing 18. Each tier carries the name of a victim and their home town.
The Georgian villa where Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union in the parlour on 10 October 1903. The restored room holds WSPU sashes, hunger-strike medals and the family's furniture.
Alfred Waterhouse's 1877 Gothic Revival civic palace, wrapped in Ford Madox Brown's twelve murals of city history. A long restoration keeps the interior closed, but the Albert Memorial of 1865 and the facade carvings reward a slow circuit.
The world's first industrial suburb. Murrays' Mills of 1798 and the eight-storey Old Mill line the Rochdale Canal; the arm and loading basin between them once fed raw cotton straight into the spinning floors, now converted to flats.
The 1906 water palace with three separate pools segregated by gender and class, Turkish baths and Edwardian stained glass. Closed in 1993, saved by a BBC Restoration vote in 2003 and reopened for tours and open days.
Opened 1879 and one of Britain's largest municipal burial grounds, holding the graves of L S Lowry, John Alcock of the first Atlantic flight, and Tony Wilson, whose Factory Records headstone was designed by Peter Saville.
The shop at 31 Toad Lane where 28 weavers opened the first successful co-operative on 21 December 1844, writing the Rochdale Principles that a billion members now follow. Counter, scales and ledgers survive on the ground floor.