Inside Manchester’s tour guide turf wars

Dear Millers — “The most innocent occupation imaginable leads to the most ferocious battles,” or so says Manchester Tour guide Ed Glinert. Here at The Mill, we pride ourselves on publishing stories about the most important, pressing issues. So when we heard about a number of ridiculous spats between the tour guides of Manchester, we knew we had to find out what was going on. Today’s piece has everything — drama, violence, gimps, pettiness — but it also asks the all important question that no other Manchester newspaper has been brave enough to ask: ‘Why are tour guides like that?’ Enjoy the article.

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It’s 11am, 6 May 2024 — a bank holiday, and the sun beats heavily down. Alan Turing sits where he always sits in Sackville Gardens: bronze bench, bronze apple in hand, bronze stare fixed straight ahead. What’s he looking at? A man in a blue jacket is standing on a bench across from him, addressing an onlooking crowd. Another man in a contrasting yellow jacket and yellow bucket hat stands behind him, wielding a yellow umbrella. Suddenly, Blue Jacket is no longer on the bench. Some say Yellow Jacket pushed him from behind — others say he jumped. Some say that punches were thrown, that fists were raised in self-defence, that one jacket shouted at the other to “get out this fucking park”. This is the world of Manchester tour guides. 

You’ll see them everywhere now that you’re looking: bucket-hatted, flag-wielding, talking with their hands about whether or not ice cream cones were invented in Ancoats. Almost every morning for the past three years, they have collided in Sackville Gardens under Alan’s vacant eye, and every week, hundreds of tourists, students, football fans and acid-house casualties are paraded through the city centre streets, bombarded with facts about Vimto and questionable anecdotes about the Gallagher brothers. This may all seem innocent but, behind the scenes, the people in charge of showing other people around Manchester are engaged in a constant turf war, one of stolen customers, destroyed equipment, false reviews, and the occasional physical scrap.

“I’ve seen tour guides impersonating each other, wearing the same colours, stealing people waiting for tours. I’ve had my speaker thrown; I’ve been told I’m not from Manchester,” says Chris Hoyle, a tour guide so incredibly from Manchester (albeit Greater) that, back in the 90s, he was a child star in Corrie. Four years ago, Hoyle swapped television for tour guiding, but not without some regret. “I thought the acting world was competitive,” he says, “but Jesus Christ, some guides would have your eyes out.”

This sentiment is shared across the city’s guiding scene. In Manchester, tour guiding is entirely unregulated — Blue Badge qualification courses that run every few years in Liverpool and London haven’t run in Manchester since 1996. This leaves a Wild West playing field dominated by guides giving free tours on a tips-based system, without qualifications or training. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that free tours are of poorer quality than the paid ones. Hayley Flynn, a badgeless tour guide who goes by the name “Skyliner”, is considered by many to be an authority on Manchester’s alternative history. Though she doesn’t seem too disparaged by the others, she explains how this lack of formal training leads to wannabe-guides learning their lines a different way — by going on other people’s tours, recording the entire thing and then stealing their content.

Flynn’s had guides record her tours. She’s also had non-guides record her tours and set up shop as guides weeks later. Sometimes, she tells me, she’s made up false facts on her tours — “Trap Streets” as she calls them — and then later heard other guides repeat them. The aggressive tactics don’t stop at plagiarism. “I’ve had guides follow me around and throw out my flyers, and then tweet about it later,” she says.

But two free guiding groups in particular seem to be engaged in a bitter, multi-year rivalry. On one side, we have our Yellow Jacket guide, who tells me how the Blue Jackets have tried to monopolise on Sackville Gardens, preventing other guides from guiding there, while making up ever-changing anecdotes about Noel Gallagher going on their tour. The Blue Jackets, meanwhile, accuse the Yellow Jacket of harassment, intimidation, theft, damaging their personal property and worse: “He’d make a point of being at the Alan Turing memorial for 20 minutes,” one guide tells me, “but not talking about Alan Turing.”

Part One: The Free-for-all

10 years ago very nearly to the day, Josh Martin sits in Sackville Gardens and the rain comes down. Usually a bright-faced and eager young man, he’s not looking too happy at the moment. He’s here to give his very first tour — in fact, it’s the first ever official free walking tour of Manchester — but no one’s shown up. Finally, at 11.05, he sees a figure enter the park and walk towards him. The man sits down next to Alan, dressed head to toe in an all-black leather gimp suit. Martin finally had a customer. “Y’alright?” the gimp asks Martin. “I wasn’t really feeling alright,” Martin tells me.

Martin set up Free Manchester Walking Tours after interrailing around Europe and going on many walks using this model, where the tour is technically free, but at the end, customers can choose whether or not to leave a tip. Keen to include the gay history of Manchester in his tours, he knew immediately that they’d start by the statue of Alan Turing. Martin tells me that his daily free tours initially “rocked the apple cart” that is Manchester’s fragile guiding scene, but within six months, he had up to 100 customers on his Saturday morning tours. Shortly afterwards, the copycats emerged.

Fast-forward to 2022, and a man named Joe Feeley shows up to one of Martin’s tours. Not content to record the tour sneakily on his phone like the others, Feeley shows up to one of Martin’s tours with a boom mic. In fact, Feeley shows up to quite a few of Martin’s tours with a boom mic. Feeley is a volunteer for North Manchester FM, with a weekly insert called “The Feel Good Show”. Martin tells me that this was his excuse for the recording device, though he didn’t believe it.

40 tours and six months later, Feeley allegedly asked Martin if he could become a guide for Free Manchester Walking Tours. By this point, FMWT was no longer a solo project, but a small collective of guides. “I was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re looking for another guide at the moment,’” Martin says, “cause he was a bit too eccentric.” One week later, Martin did take on a new guide, and he cites this as the cause for all the chaos and carnage that ensued.

Feeley set up his own tour guiding group instead: Manchester Free Walking Tour. While Martin’s tours started by Alan Turing at 11am, Feeley’s started at the arch in Chinatown at 10, and arrived at Sackville Gardens at 10.45, just as Martin’s customers were starting to arrive. For the next three years — and up until the present day — Free Manchester Walking Tours and Manchester Free Walking Tour collided by the Alan Turing memorial nearly every single morning.

Here’s what went down according to Martin. Feeley allegedly tried swiping people arriving for Martin’s tours. As a result, Martin put a note on his website telling customers to “find the guide in the blue coat”. “And then he, [Feeley], started turning up in a blue coat,” Martin says (though his rival has since returned to yellow). Martin tells me that Feeley snapped their flags, and stole and hid their speakers. He shows me an email from one of his guides from 2 September 2024: “[Feeley’s] in full force today. Circled me by Alan Turing on his bike, trying to start an argument about you… making up that you’re from Manchester.” According to Martin, the aggressive tactics only got worse, climaxing when Feeley allegedly pushed one of Martin’s guides off a bench. On more than one occasion, the police were called.

“The police rang me at nine in the morning and said there’s an allegation that you’ve been moving speakers,” Joe Feeley tells me. We’re two pints down in the Chop House, and I still have quite a few of Martin’s accusations to get through. “I said that’s not an allegation, that’s happened. But the question is: why is there a speaker there for me to move? If Alan Turing is there, and there’s a speaker there, and I’m there, and it’s blasting, I’m gonna move it.”

Feeley’s in his yellow coat, his yellow umbrella perched beside us, but his yellow bucket hat has been replaced with a blue Oasis one. When I ask him if he’s ever heckled the Blue Jackets for not being from Manchester, Feeley says, “Is that a problem?” Did he change the colour of his coat to match Martin’s? “Probably, yeah,” he says. “So what though?” When I bring up the incident of stealing speakers, he tells me that he grabbed one of the Blue Jackets’ speakers from next to Alan, ran across Sackville Gardens, jumped over the wall, and put it back down on the pavement. He tells me that when the council confronted him about the push, he said “I’d push him again. Why’s he getting on benches that people sit on?”

But Feeley has his own allegations towards the Blue Jackets. First of all, he informs me that Martin omitted a key aspect of their meeting — the pair first met in Liverpool, where Martin was actually a customer on one of Feeley’s tours. He describes how the Blue Jackets are hell bent on monopolising Sackville Gardens, alleging that Martin once told him that they “own this park”. According to Feeley, the Blue Jackets frequently blast music from their speakers, once even putting the speaker right up to his face — this, he says, was the real reason behind the push. He adds that Martin wrote increasingly unkind statements about him on his website, advising tour-goers to avoid him. “Don’t go off with the disheveled man,” suggested one of them, according to Feeley, and “avoid the odd man called Joe.”

Part Two: The battle of the badges

But the spat between Martin and Feeley is only one part of a larger war. Seven weeks ago, Blue Badge tour guide Jonathan Schofield was walking past Sackville Gardens on his way to work. Green Badge guide Ed Glinert was walking down Canal Street, not on his way to anywhere in particular. According to Schofield, Glinert appeared around the corner, “suddenly in my face”. By Glinert’s account, Schofield “assaulted” him in the streets, and shouted “Have some pride in the badge!”

Here is Manchester’s second big battle of the guides. On one side we have Glinert, a bespectacled man in his 60s, and a guide whose Tripadvisor reviews precede him. On the other, we have Schofield, 60, editor-at-large at Manchester Confidential, and a tour-guide-at-large described to me variously as “the pinnacle of tour guide” and “one of the worst,” in terms of bad behaviour, “but he’s got that Tony Wilson charm”.

“The most innocent occupation imaginable leads to the most ferocious battles,” Glinert tells me. We’re in the reading room of the Portico Library, where he appears to be something of a fixture. In hushed but frantic tones he tells me that “tour guiding in Manchester is in total disarray. That’s the fault of one group of people: the traditional, longstanding Manchester Blue Badge Guides, led by Jonathan Schofield.”

Schofield qualified as a Blue Badge guide in 1996, the very last time the course ran in Manchester. He describes the course as something akin to “The Knowledge” — the infamous, rigorous testing process that all of London’s black cab drivers must pass. “It was so academic,” he says. “We had to learn all the different kinds of sheep in north west England.” 12 years later, in 2008, Marketing Manchester decided to run one more qualification course: the Green Badge course, this time taught by Schofield — and, crucially, taken by Glinert.

Blue Badge courses cover entire regions (in this case, the north west of England), while Green Badge courses only cover cities (in this case, Manchester). Glinert tells me that Green Badge guides such as himself are effectively “second-class citizens”. He claims that the Blue Badge Guides held a vote over whether to even allow the Green Badge qualification to go ahead — a vote that Schofield doesn’t deny, but also doesn’t remember. “To me that smacks of something out of communist Russia,” says Glinert, who later retracts this statement to describe the situation as more akin to “Chicago under Al Capone”. “They only let us become Green Badge guides, inferiors, so that they were our overlords,” he says.

Glinert describes the course itself as a “con” and “abysmal beyond belief”. Among his qualms are coaches that were not fit for purpose, classes held in rowdy pubs and the fact that “Schofield just doesn’t know his history”. He cites a number of facts that he believes to be false that Schofield tells on his tours: that Rolls and Royce met at the Midland Hotel; that the post box on Corporation Street survived the IRA bombing; that Mamucium is the Roman name for Manchester; that the three stripes on Manchester’s coat of arms symbolise the Irwell, Medlock, and the Irk.

“Jesus Christ man, get over it, who cares?” says Schofield. At first, Schofield wasn’t all that keen to chat. Speaking to me briefly off-record, he clarified after every other sentence that our chat was off-record, and then sent me a written statement in which he notes that every profession has its bad actors — “including journalism”. However, after sending him an extensive list of Glinert’s accusations towards him, Schofield asked if the two of us could meet up in the next hour, at a nearby pub.

Among those charges is the claim that Schofield more than once berated Glinert for conducting tips-based tours, despite having a Green Badge qualification. On one occasion, after Glinert described a passing pro-Palestine rally as a “Hamas Mob” during one of his tours, prompting a number of bad reviews, Schofield — by both of their accounts — sent Glinert an email suggesting that he “give up guiding”.

So, why is it that the tour guiding profession attracts these sorts of people? I asked every guide I spoke to, and not one of them could give me an answer. Perhaps it’s telling that so many tour guides used to be journalists — after all, both Glinert and Schofield wrote for City Life, and Schofield still writes for Confidentials. Is this the future that we, the Mill writers, have in store? Snapping each other's flags and stealing each other's speakers? Arguing about which building in Manchester was Hitler’s favourite?

Who can really tell? As Alan Turing once said (or didn’t, Jesus Christ, who cares), “sometimes it is the people that no one imagines anything of, who do the things that no one can imagine”.

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