The award-winning Whitaker Gallery & Museum is a multi-purpose venue which celebrates the area’s varied and amazing heritage whilst providing a dynamic, challenging and diverse programme of events, exhibitions and education-based activities. And the cafe’s pretty good too!
Blackburn’s Confessional Festival turns ten, celebrating with two days of live music set beneath the stained glass and vaulted stonework of Holy Trinity Church.
From £20
To mark Ted Hughes’s birthday on 17 August, four dynamic Northern poets will gather in his native Mytholmroyd to celebrate the landscape and poetry of the former Poet Laureate.
Free entry
Poetry at the Dusty Miller is a now regular night with invited readers, organised by poets Carola Luther and Ian Humphreys in the Coiners’ Room in the Mytholmroyd pub.
Free entry
A three-course vegan menu inspired by West African traditions.
From £25.00
Bake the Jewish Museum cafe’s signature tahini and honey cookies whilst discovering the history behind each ingredient.
From £0.00
A glittering night of cabaret, circus and fairytales from Ember & the Vixens – part escapist fantasy, part empowering spectacle.
From £18.00
Following its acclaimed debut in 2024, Star Nhà Ease, the UK’s only curated season celebrating Vietnamese cinema, arrives at Manchester’s Cultplex.
From £7.50
UrbanArtistry is back for a second season starting with a behind the scenes account of Rome’s most wanted street artist in The Art of Disobedience.
From £7.50
The Eagle and Child in Ramsbottom does what good pubs do best, and more.
Now ten years old, this double market combines a farmers’ market and a craft fair and provides the perfect excuse to visit the picturesque town of Ramsbottom, which nestles in the Lancashire foothills to the north of Manchester.
Helmed by chef-owners Fiona and Joe Botham, this tapas restaurant in Ramsbottom serves exclusively Spanish drinks and some of the best small plates going.
Colleen’s is a casual dining neighbourhood restaurant in the heart of Ramsbottom serving seasonal dishes.
Sports venue in Ramsbottom and home to the annual Ramsbottom Festival.
Burnley’s Panopticon, ‘Singing Ringing Tree’, is a unique musical sculpture which overlooks Burnley from its position high above the town on Crown Point. Constructed from pipes of galvanised steel stacked in layers, this Panopticon takes the form of a tree bending to the winds and harnesses the energy of those winds to produce a low, tuneful song.
Historic house, art gallery and museum. Museum houses a variety of displays, encompassing natural history, Egyptology, local history, textiles, decorative art and regional furniture. Art gallery is focused on Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite art, “with some earlier paintings as well”.
Burrs Country Park lies on the River Irwell covering an area of 36 hectares of scenic countryside, one mile northwest of Bury town centre.
The Weavers Triangle is a modern name for an area on the banks of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal that was once at the heart of Burnley’s textile industry. The name was first used in the 1970s, as interest developed in preserving Burnley’s industrial heritage, and refers to the roughly triangular shape of the region.
Burnley Mechanics Theatre showcases an array of talent; touring shows and local theatre also.
Glassmonkey Studio is the largest glass fusing studio in the area. The studio is home to a gallery selling handmade fused glassware jewellery, art and greeting cards. They also host regular workshops for fused glass, soap making, enamelling, and silver clay jewellery making.
Affectionately referred to as the ‘Downton of the North’, Gawthorpe Hall was redesigned in the 1850s by Sir Charles Barry, designer of the Houses of Parliament and the ‘real’ Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle.
Chocolate fountains, beautiful batiks and medieval marginalia - this month's supersized Exhibitions Guide has it all.
August brings a huge LGBTQ+ film festival, plus a reggae classic and a spotlight on Japanese animation.
From outdoor shows to drama in the dark, our theatre guide celebrates genre-pushing work, new writing and contemporary performance.
From Lyra Pramuk’s sacred synths to the sugar rush of YAANG, our latest music picks bring ritual, rebellion and ridiculous levels of fun.
"Tours, tours, tours!" If this month's Tours and Activities guide were a sentient speaking person, this is what it would say.
Take some eating-out tips from our August guide to food and drink in Manchester and the North.
Our latest round-up features plenty of one-off live literature events to wrap your ears about, so get those diaries ticking over...
