There is a reasonable argument that more of the modern world was invented in Manchester than in any other city of comparable size, and an equally reasonable argument that the bill for it was paid by people who got nothing out of it. Both are true, and the city is unusually willing to say so.
The first industrial city
In 1750 Manchester was a market town of perhaps 20,000 people. By 1850 it had around 300,000 and it was the centre of the world’s cotton trade.
What made it possible was a combination that existed nowhere else: damp air that stopped cotton thread snapping, soft water off the Pennines for washing and dyeing, coal under the hills, a port at Liverpool thirty-five miles away, and no ancient guild structure to stop anybody building whatever they liked.
Then the machines. Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s mule, Cartwright’s power loom, and — decisively — steam, which meant a mill no longer had to sit on a river.
The Bridgewater Canal reached Castlefield in 1761 and halved the price of coal. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830 from Liverpool Road, the first intercity passenger railway in the world.
Manchester was not a city that industrialised. It was the city that industrialised, and everyone came to look at it. Visitors used the word “Cottonopolis” and they did not mean it kindly.
What it was like to live in
Ancoats — the first industrial suburb anywhere — had cellar dwellings, no sewers, and average life expectancy in the twenties.
Friedrich Engels arrived in 1842, aged twenty-one, to work in his father’s Salford cotton firm. What he saw produced The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1845, one of the founding documents of socialism, and it is substantially a description of these streets. He and Marx read together in Chetham’s Library beside the cathedral, and the alcove they used is still there.
Cholera came in 1832 and 1849. The Irk ran black. A doctor writing in 1832 counted the privies in a district and found one for every 250 people.
The wealth was real and so was the squalor, and they were four hundred metres apart.
Peterloo
On 16 August 1819, around 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary representation — Manchester at that point had no MP. Cavalry rode into the crowd. At least eighteen died; hundreds were injured.
Two things came out of it. The government passed the repressive Six Acts. And John Edward Taylor, who had been in the field, founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821 to report what the establishment press would not.
The memorial went up in 2019, two hundred years late.
The arguments Manchester won
Free trade. The Anti-Corn Law League, founded here in 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright, campaigned against the tariffs keeping bread expensive and won in 1846. The Free Trade Hall was built on the Peterloo site to commemorate it — the only building in Britain named after an economic policy.
Co-operation. The Rochdale Pioneers opened their shop on Toad Lane in 1844 and wrote the rules that every co-operative in the world still uses.
Trade unionism. The first Trades Union Congress met in Manchester in 1868.
Votes for women. Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in her front room at 62 Nelson Street in 1903. The house is now the Pankhurst Centre and it is open to the public.
Vegetarianism, the Guardian, and the modern professional orchestra by way of the Hallé in 1858.
The science
John Dalton worked out atomic theory in Manchester in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He is on the Town Hall wall collecting marsh gas in a bog.
James Joule — a Salford brewer — established the mechanical equivalent of heat, which is why the unit of energy carries his name.
Ernest Rutherford split the atom at the University of Manchester in 1917, having already discovered the nucleus there in 1911.
The Manchester Baby ran the world’s first stored-program computer program on 21 June 1948. Alan Turing came to work on its successor and was living in Wilmslow when he was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. There is a statue of him in Sackville Gardens and an apology from a British government that took until 2009 to arrive.
Graphene was isolated at the university in 2004, which produced two Nobel prizes and a great deal of local expectation that has not entirely been met.
And then it stopped
Cotton went. Indian and Japanese production undercut Lancashire from the 1920s; the mills closed through the fifties and sixties. The Manchester Ship Canal docks shut in 1982. Manufacturing employment collapsed.
By 1990 central Manchester had a residential population in the hundreds, derelict mills with trees growing on them, and one of the highest unemployment rates in England.
What rebuilt it was music, football, students, and — with a bitter irony that nobody here misses — the IRA bomb of 15 June 1996, which destroyed a large area of the centre and released the insurance money and the political will to redesign it.
The point
Manchester did not become a great city and then have some difficult decades. It built the thing that made the modern world, was ruined by the same forces, and rebuilt itself in a form that would be unrecognisable to the people who did the first part.
You can see all three phases in an afternoon’s walk, and the city’s museums — free, and unusually blunt — will tell you the uncomfortable parts without being asked.