Over the last year we’ve been digging into this heritage to create a self-guided walking tour. That’s meant working with tour guides, scouring the internet, and diving into the brilliant Manchester Digital Music Archive.

The knowledge quarter has always been a natural home for live music, from basement dives to grand concert halls and everything in between. That’s why festivals like Manchester Psych Fest and Punk Fest thrive alongside a stacked calendar of gigs, concerts and club nights. Looking back, the roll call is staggering. Manchester Academy alone has hosted everyone from David Bowie and Stevie Wonder to Nirvana, Queen and Lady Gaga. Just over ten years ago, punters queued in the bucketing rain for a surprise £10-a-ticket gig by none other than Prince.

The tour doesn’t just look at today’s venues and legendary names who have come through the city. It’s an exploration of a changing landscape and how spaces shift from generation to generation. This is starkly drawn when you cross the Epping Walk Bridge into Hulme, forever known as the Joy Division bridge thanks to Kevin Cummins’ photography. The Manchester you see from here today would be unrecognisable to the boys in those iconic images. As would Hulme itself, where The Beatles made their BBC radio debut at NIAMOS in 1962. The same venue was reopened in the ’90s by Nina Simone. Just around the corner stood Arch Bar, where 20-year-old Amy Winehouse played her first solo gig outside London. Today, it’s a block of flats.

Long before The Bridgewater Hall or Royal Northern College of Music, there was the Manchester Gentleman’s Concert Hall. In 1848, Chopin himself performed there — “He is very spare in frame, and there is an almost painful air of feebleness in his appearance and gait,” wrote the Manchester Guardian at the time. It’s a recital still commemorated each year with the RNCM’s Chopin Prize; there’s a statue there too. The Gentleman’s Concert Hall was demolished over a hundred years ago to make way for the Midland Hotel.

It’s a pattern woven throughout the history of this ever-changing city. Places mean different things to each generation. Take the Tesco Metro on Oxford Street. To some, it’s just a convenient, if slightly chaotic, spot to pick up a meal deal. To others, it’s a no-go, having sworn never to enter the place which was once Jilly’s Rockworld and the site of their goth awakening. It was also Music Box and before that Rafters, where Tony Wilson first saw Joy Division. Before that it was Fagins.

Across the road is Temple, once a public toilet and famously celebrated by Elbow as the “hole in the neighbourhood.”

So it goes.

Then there’s Madchester. Tony Wilson, Factory Records and The Haçienda. The club that bankrupted the socialist record label became the epicentre of a cultural movement the city has never really escaped. This part of Manchester was (mostly) at the centre of it all.

But the story didn’t end there. Manchester has always been a brilliant place for musicians and music lovers, and it still is. The next generation of talent is being nurtured at the RNCM and BIMM, while future nostalgia is written every night in venues like The Deaf Institute, Gorilla, YES and Ambers. These spaces may not carry the mythology of the Haçienda, not yet at least, but for those who saw the likes of Little Simz, King Gizzard and Charli XCX here, those memories will be told and retold in years to come.

We have done our best to pull together the detail as accurately as we can. The trick is knowing what to believe. So much of Manchester’s music history has been passed down word-of-mouth, impossible to trace back to a single source. As Tony Wilson probably didn’t say: when you have to choose between the truth and the legend… print the legend.

From Sir Charles Hallé’s orchestra to punk awakenings, acid house nights and Britpop anthems, the Oxford Road Corridor is where Manchester’s musical DNA comes alive. Walk it in 90 minutes, stretch it over an afternoon with a pint or two, or simply read at your own pace.

Tour is available here.