Manchester has a story that is no ordinary local history. Although, as its name suggests, there is evidence beneath its streets of the first mud and timber fort the Romans built, some two thousand years ago – and of continuous occupation ever since – the city’s worldwide fame and reputation derives from its extraordinary development over the past two and a half centuries. In that more recent past, its life has been inextricably entwined with the rise and fall of the nation’s fortunes and, to no small extent, those of the British Empire.
Manchester was the shock city of the early 19th century ... the place where it was all happening. The radical new relationships forged there between employer and employee greatly influenced the development of Marxism, with all its consequences for the 20th century. According to Asa Briggs, had Engels lived in Birmingham and not Manchester, Marx might well have ended up a currency reformer rather than a Communist. Manchester was right at the cutting edge of dramatic changes in our domestic society – technological, social, economic and political.
In transport terms alone, the city led the way with the first real canal, the first real railway, the first public bus services and the first municipal airport. Its local government set a pace for enterprise that the rest of the country could only follow. The social and economic problems that arose here became matters of national concern, while the political issues that stirred the city led to national reform. Disraeli coined the term 'the Manchester School' to describe the middle-class radicals who were the prime movers of the Anti-Corn Law League. Its most famous newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, held the attention of the nation's decision-makers for many decades before it became a national paper; and when the population took to the streets they shook the government to its core, fearful of a revolution.
The tumultuous events of its pioneering industrial period are not the whole of Manchester's history, as the author reveals in this entertaining account of the city's entire story, illustrated with over 100 carefully chosen and well captioned illustrations.
Contents:
List of Illustrations
Introduction and Acknowledgements
1. The Edge of the Empire
2. The Lost Castle
3. The Best Builded Town
4. Besieged
5. Jacobites
6. Patriotism and Protest
7. The Work of Titans
8. The Sewer of Gold
9. Blanketeers and Peterloo
10. The Iron Road
11. The Borough
12. The Condition of the Working Class in Manchester
13. From Borough to City
14. The Great Clean-up
15. A Terror to the Poor
16. The Great Octopus
17. Manchester-on-Sea
18. The Death of King Cotton
19. Armistice to Welfare State
20. Total War
21. A City Reborn
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
