Manchester Histories Festival 2026

10 editions in, and Manchester Histories Festival is still finding stories that official records have skirted over.

This city’s always been good at telling its own tale. Sometimes so good, in fact, that history tips towards mythology. Manchester Histories Festival has spent a decade grounding it, often by handing the storytelling back to the people.

The clearest expression of that this year is the Threads of a City: The Manchester Tapestry Project – a large-scale collaborative textile work spanning Manchester’s identity from its incorporation in 1853 to the present. Community groups have spent months researching the themes – migration, protest and belonging among them – with designers turning that material into the patterns from which the tapestry will be stitched.

Open to anyone aged 15 and over, stitching workshops run across all three days of the festival, inviting the public to add their own hand to the work before it’s displayed at Manchester Town Hall.

Some of those stories have names and addresses. Champs Camp was the boxing gym Phil Martin founded in Moss Side & Hulme in the early 1980s, without public funding. Martin became the UK’s first Black boxing trainer, manager and promoter simultaneously; the gym produced four British champions by the early 1990s.

Friday sees the premiere of a film about Champs Camp made by young people, and Saturday’s open afternoon at the Phil Martin Centre opens the archive up. Here, exhibitions and tours gather the material evidence of a story being formally recovered for the first time.

From that specific story, the programme pulls back to a broader question: what gets to become history, and who decides? The Heritage in Action panel at Manchester Central Library brings together Keisha Thompson from The Guardian’s Legacies of Enslavement Programme, Yussuf M’Rabty, Project Manager for This Is Us: Tracing Manchester’s Histories at Manchester Histories, alongside further guests, to examine who gets to shape the historical record.

A live and democratic expression of the same impulse comes with Thursday’s Histories Slam, hosted by Salford writer Tony Kinsella, where 14 people from across Greater Manchester take to the stage with the kind of true, personal histories that rarely make it into any kind of official record.

Saturday’s Celebration Day is the festival’s most direct expression of civic pride – over 40 heritage and history stalls drawing hundreds of people from across Greater Manchester, with tours, live entertainment and a heritage bus threading through it all. Simultaneously, The John Rylands Library opens its doors for What Is History For?, a question that, by Saturday, the whole weekend will have already begun to answer.

Reserve your free places in advance.
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