Saturday 21 February
9.00am (c) from Northwich Memorial Hall
Other pick-up points available - details and booking conditions here.
£15.00 - click here to book online.
We spend the day in Manchester exploring 3 galleries.


Also on display will be work by Cai Guo-Qiang, a leading Chinese-born contemporary artist, known for his remarkable projects using gunpowder, including the firework displays for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. His installation Unmanned Nature (2008), a forty-five metre long, four metre high gunpowder drawing, will be the first exhibition in the Whitworth’s new Landscape Gallery.
Celebrating the recent major gift by The Karpidas Foundation of 90 contemporary works of art to the Whitworth, this exhibition features a selection of those works, indicating the artistic vision and breadth of the Foundation. British and North American artists are featured, with many highly regarded names - Laure Prouvost, Dorothy Cross, Nathan Coley, Anna Barriball and Gillian Wearing, as well as Keith Coventry, Gary Hume, Dexter Dalwood and Michael Craig Martin.
At the Manchester Museum Siberia - At the Edge of the World explores the natural history and culture of this immense territory that is one and a half times bigger than Europe. Combining stunning photographic images of its vast landscapes and diverse people with a selection of natural history specimens and cultural objects, the exhibition will examine different aspects of Siberia’s environment and culture, dispelling some of the misconceptions surrounding the land and its people. Items from British and Russian museums will be brought together for the first exhibition of its kind in the UK.
The Manchester City Art Gallery has 3 special exhibitions in addition to the permanent collection.
The Sensory War 1914 - 2014 exhibition marks the Centenary of the First World War and explores how artists have communicated the impact of military conflict on the body, mind, environment and human senses between 1914 and 2014. The show examines how artists from 1914 onwards depicted the devastating impact of new military technologies utilised in a century of conflict beginning with the First World War. It brings together work from a range of leading artists including Henry Lamb, CRW Nevinson, Paul Nash, Otto Dix, Nancy Spero, Richard Mosse, Omer Fast and features works by the hibakusha; survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima which were created in the 1970s and are being shown in the UK for the first time.
Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War is an exhibition of work by acclaimed British painter, Stanley Spencer, on loan from the National Trust's Sandham Memorial Chapel. This exhibition features a series of large-scale arched canvases and side panels detailing scenes of the artist's own wartime experiences. Working as a soldier within a hospital, his recollections focus on the domestic rather than the combative and evoke everyday experience in which he found spiritual resonance and sustenance.
Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald laid the foundation stone of the Manchester Central Library on 6 May 1930. Four years later the library was officially opened on 17 July 1934 by King George V. The Library reopened in March 2014 following a 4 year, £50m refit.
Adrian Sumner will be with us to help understand the exhibitions.
Sheffield - City of Steel
Saturday 21 March
8.30am (b) from Northwich Memorial Hall
Other pick-up points available - details and booking conditions here.
£20.00 - click here to book online.

Adjacent is the impressive multi award-winning Winter Garden, one of the largest temperate glasshouses to be built in the UK during the last hundred years, creating a stunning green world with more than 2,500 plants from around the world.
The Graves Gallery is the home of the City's visual art collection. Famous names on show at the Graves include Burne Jones, Turner and Sisley, while more recent artists include Damien Hirst, Bridget Riley, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Marc Quinn. Local heroes include George Fullard, Derrick Greaves and Stanley Royle. Temporary exhibitions include the work of Edward Bawden, one of Britain's most influential graphic designers of the 20thC.


Other Sheffield attractions include the National Emergency Services Museum, The Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Paul, The Peace Gardens and of course, the world famous Crucible Theatre!
Adrian Sumner will be with us to help understand the exhibitions.
Sheffield City map here.
Lincoln and the Magna Carta
Saturday 11 April
8.00am (a) from Northwich Memorial Hall
Other pick-up points available - details and booking conditions here.
£24.00 - click here to book online.

As well as the new Magna Carta displays, the Castle Walls and Prison have been extensively refurbished, and a new Heritage Skills Centre opened.


The Museum of Lincolnshire Life’s rich and varied social history collection reflects and celebrates the culture of Lincolnshire and its people from 1750 to the present day. Exhibits illustrate commercial, domestic, agricultural, industrial and community life.
As the home to an authentic World War One tank named “Flirt”, the museum also houses interactive galleries of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment, which have won prestigious national awards.
The Collection is an award winning archaeology museum with displays covering the stone, bronze and iron ages, romans, anglo-saxons, vikings and the civil war. Adjacent is the Usher Gallery, region's premier art gallery. The Usher Gallery combines displays from its permanent collections of fine arts, decorative arts and horology, enhanced by loans of acclaimed works from national collections, with a vibrant programme of temporary exhibitions. Includes local scenes by L.S. Lowry, Peter DeWint, J.M.W. Turner and John Carmichael, works by turn of the 20th Century artists such as Jacob Epstein and Ella Curtois and vases by Grayson Perry.
The temporary exhibition is (detail) which features the work of 118 international artists, including David Reed, Fiona Rae, Daniel Sturgis, Neal Rock, Pavel Büchler, Shirley Kaneda and Julie Heffernan, who have each selected a close-up from one of their paintings. These details are printed and displayed together to give both a tantalising glimpse into each artwork, and create a huge collage of images.
Lincoln City map here.
Caernarfon and Llanberis Railway
Sunday 10 May
8.30am (b) from Northwich Memorial Hall
Other pick-up points available - details and booking conditions here.
£22.00 - click here to book online.
A brute of a fortress. Caernarfon Castle’s pumped-up appearance is unashamedly muscle-bound and intimidating. Picking a fight with this massive structure would have been a daunting prospect. By throwing his weight around in stone, King Edward I created what is surely one of the most impressive of Wales’s castles. Worthy of World Heritage status no less!
The site of this great castle wasn’t chosen by accident. It had previously been the location of a Norman motte and bailey castle and before that a Roman fort stood nearby. The lure of water and easy access to the sea made the banks of the River Seiont an ideal spot for Edward’s monster in masonry. Edward wasn’t one to miss on an opportunity to tighten his grip even further on the native population. The birth of his son, the first English Prince of Wales, in the castle in 1284, was a perfect device to stamp his supremacy. In 1969 the current Prince of Wales, HRH Prince Charles’s investiture took place here.

On the outskirts of the town is Segontium, the remains of the Roman fort that was built to defend the Roman Empire against rebellious tribes. Segontium was later plundered to provide stone for Edward I's castle at Caernarfon.

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