Manchester’s history is lopsided. Seventeen centuries of being a place, then roughly a hundred years in which it rearranged how human beings live, then a collapse, then a rebuild.
Mamucium
The Romans built a fort at the confluence of the Medlock and the Irwell around 79 AD, on the road between Chester and York. A civilian settlement grew outside it. The garrison left by about 410 and the site was abandoned.
You can see a reconstruction of the north gate at Castlefield.
The long middle
Anglo-Saxon and then Norman Manchester was a manor of no particular importance. Domesday in 1086 barely mentions it. A market charter came in 1301.
The collegiate church was founded in 1421 and is now the cathedral. Chetham’s Library, in the surviving college buildings, opened in 1653 and is the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world.
Textiles were here early — a woollen and linen trade from the fourteenth century, and fustian, a linen-cotton mix, from the sixteenth. But the town had perhaps 10,000 people in 1700.
Cottonopolis
Then, in fifty years, everything.
The Bridgewater Canal opened in 1761, halving the price of coal. Arkwright built a steam-assisted mill in Manchester in 1783. The mills went up along the canals in Ancoats — the first industrial suburb in the world.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened from Liverpool Road in 1830: the first intercity passenger railway anywhere.
Population went from about 25,000 in 1772 to over 300,000 by 1850. Manchester became a borough in 1838 and a city in 1853.
The conditions were among the worst recorded anywhere in Europe. Engels described them in 1845; cholera arrived in 1832 and 1849; life expectancy in the poorest districts was in the twenties.
The arguments
Peterloo, 16 August 1819 — cavalry into a crowd of 60,000 demanding the vote. At least eighteen dead.
The Manchester Guardian founded in 1821 as a direct result.
The Anti-Corn Law League from 1838, winning repeal in 1846. The Rochdale Pioneers and the co-operative movement in 1844. The first TUC in 1868. The suffragettes founded by Emmeline Pankhurst at 62 Nelson Street in 1903.
The Manchester Ship Canal opened in 1894, making an inland city into Britain’s third busiest port and cutting Liverpool out of the dock dues. It is still the reason the relationship between the two cities is what it is.
Decline
Cotton was undercut by India and Japan from the 1920s and the mills closed through the fifties and sixties. Manchester was heavily bombed in the Christmas Blitz of 1940. The docks closed in 1982.
By 1990 the centre had a few hundred residents, derelict mills, and severe unemployment.
The rebuild
Music and clubs from 1976 onwards. Two Olympic bids that failed and delivered infrastructure anyway. The Metrolink from 1992.
The IRA bomb of 15 June 1996 — 1,500 kg, the largest peacetime explosion in Britain, 200 injured, nobody killed because of a coded warning and a mass evacuation. It flattened a large part of the retail centre and, brutally, unlocked the money and the political will to redesign it.
The 2002 Commonwealth Games built the stadium that is now the Etihad and regenerated east Manchester.
Since 2010, a residential boom in the centre, a skyline, devolution and an elected mayor, and a population that has grown faster than almost anywhere in the UK.
The recent wound
22 May 2017 — a suicide bomb at the Manchester Arena at the end of an Ariana Grande concert killed 22 people, many of them children. The worker bee became the symbol of the response, and the Glade of Light memorial beside the cathedral is where people go.
The fuller version is The City That Made the Modern World, and the dated version is the timeline.