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.