Timeline of Manchester

A fort on the sandstone bluff. The Romans build Mamucium above the confluence of the Medlock and the Irwell, on the road between Chester and York. A civilian settlement grows outside the walls. A reconstruction of the north gate stands at Castlefield.

The garrison leaves. Roman authority in Britain ends and Mamucium is abandoned. The site is not meaningfully reoccupied for centuries, and Manchester spends the next thousand years as a place of no importance whatever.

Edward the Elder repairs the burh. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records a force sent to Manchester to man and repair the fortification — the first written mention of the town under a recognisable name.

Domesday, briefly. Manchester appears in the survey as part of the hundred of Salford, with a church of St Mary and a church of St Michael. It is a manor, not a town.

A market charter. Thomas Grelley grants Manchester its charter, making it a free borough with the right to hold a market. The town begins trading wool and, later, linen.

The collegiate church. Henry V licenses the founding of a college of priests around the parish church. The building becomes Manchester Cathedral in 1847, and the quire stalls carved around 1505 survive with their misericords.

Manchester Grammar School. Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter and a Lancashire man, founds a free grammar school for local boys. It still exists, and its endowment in the town’s corn mills funded it for centuries.

Chetham’s Library opens. Humphrey Chetham’s will funds a library and a hospital for poor boys in the old college buildings beside the church. It is the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world and is still open. Marx and Engels read together in one of its alcoves in 1845.

The Bridgewater Canal. The Duke of Bridgewater’s canal reaches Castlefield from his coal mines at Worsley and halves the price of coal in Manchester almost overnight. It is the first British canal built independently of a river, and it starts a national canal mania.

Steam comes to cotton. Richard Arkwright builds a cotton mill on Shudehill using a steam engine to pump water back to the wheel. Within twenty years steam has freed the mill from the river, and mills can be built wherever there is coal and labour.

The Rochdale Canal completes. The first canal to cross the Pennines links Manchester to Yorkshire. Ancoats fills with mills along its banks and becomes the first industrial suburb in the world.

The first intercity railway. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens on 15 September from Liverpool Road — the first railway anywhere to run scheduled passenger services between two cities by steam alone. On the opening day the MP William Huskisson steps into the path of Rocket and is killed. The station survives and is the oldest in the world.

Manchester becomes a borough. Nearly two decades after Peterloo, the town finally gets its own municipal government under the Municipal Corporations Act. The population is approaching 200,000.

City status. Manchester is granted city status by Queen Victoria — the first new English city since Bristol in 1542. The cotton trade is at its height and the town is being called Cottonopolis in print.

The Art Treasures Exhibition. Manchester mounts the largest art exhibition ever held anywhere — over 16,000 works, borrowed from private collections across Europe, in a purpose-built glass hall at Old Trafford. More than a million people come. It is the city announcing that it has culture as well as money.

The Hallé’s first concert. Charles Hallé, who came to Manchester as a refugee from the 1848 revolutions and found the local orchestra intolerable, forms his own. It is the oldest professional symphony orchestra in the United Kingdom and still plays, now at the Bridgewater Hall.

The Town Hall opens. Alfred Waterhouse’s Gothic Town Hall is finished after nine years and roughly a million pounds. Ford Madox Brown begins the Great Hall murals two years later: no kings or battles, but weaving, chemistry and drainage.

The Ship Canal. After six years of digging, ocean-going ships sail thirty-six miles inland to Salford. Manchester — a city with no coastline — becomes Britain’s third busiest port, and stops paying Liverpool’s dock dues. Neither city has forgotten.

The John Rylands Library. Enriqueta Rylands opens the library she built to commemorate her husband, ten years in the making, electric from day one and with filtered air to keep the city’s soot off the books. It is free, and it is the most beautiful room in Manchester.

Victoria Baths. The Corporation opens what it calls the most splendid municipal bathing institution in the country — three pools, Turkish baths and a public laundry, in glazed tile and stained glass. Most houses in the district have no bathroom. It closes in 1993 and is still not a working pool.

Peterloo. On 16 August around 60,000 people gather on St Peter’s Field to demand parliamentary representation — Manchester has no MP at all. Cavalry ride into the crowd. At least eighteen are killed and hundreds injured. The memorial is built two hundred years later.

The Manchester Guardian. John Edward Taylor, who was in the field at Peterloo, founds a newspaper to report what the establishment press would not. It drops Manchester from its title in 1959 and is now one of the most-read English-language news sites in the world.

The Anti-Corn Law League. Richard Cobden and John Bright found the League in Manchester to campaign against the tariffs keeping bread expensive. The Free Trade Hall is later built on the Peterloo site to commemorate the victory — the only building in Britain named after an economic policy.

The Rochdale Pioneers. Twenty-eight weavers open a shop on Toad Lane in Rochdale selling flour, butter, sugar and oatmeal, and write down a set of rules for running it. Every co-operative in the world still uses them.

Engels publishes. The Condition of the Working Class in England, written by a twenty-four-year-old sent to Manchester to work in his father’s mill, is substantially a description of Ancoats and the courts around it. It becomes a founding text of socialism.

The Corn Laws are repealed. Peel’s government abolishes the tariffs, splitting the Conservative Party for a generation. It is the first great victory of an organised extra-parliamentary campaign in Britain, and it was run from Manchester.

The first public library. Manchester opens the first library in the country under the Public Libraries Act — free, lending, and open to anyone. Dickens and Thackeray both speak at the opening.

The first TUC. The inaugural Trades Union Congress meets in Manchester. Thirty-four delegates attend, representing about 118,000 members. The banners of the societies that sent them are at the People’s History Museum.

The WSPU is founded. Emmeline Pankhurst founds the Women’s Social and Political Union in her front room at 62 Nelson Street, on the principle of deeds rather than words. The house is now the Pankhurst Centre and is open to the public.

Some women get the vote. The Representation of the People Act enfranchises women over thirty who meet a property qualification, and all men over twenty-one. It takes another decade to reach equal terms. Emmeline Pankhurst dies weeks before that second Act passes.

Rutherford splits the atom. Working at the University of Manchester, where he had already identified the atomic nucleus in 1911, Ernest Rutherford achieves the first artificial nuclear reaction. Manchester’s scientific century — Dalton, Joule, Rutherford, Turing, graphene — runs through one university.

The Christmas Blitz. Two nights of raids on 22 and 23 December kill around 680 people and destroy a large part of the centre. A landmine takes off the corner of the cathedral, which stands open to the sky for years.

The Baby runs. On 21 June the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine executes the world’s first stored-program computer program. Alan Turing arrives to work on its successor and is living in Wilmslow when he is prosecuted in 1952. A replica is at the Science and Industry Museum.

Munich. On 6 February the aircraft carrying the Manchester United team home from Belgrade crashes on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway. Eight players die, with three staff and eight journalists. Duncan Edwards is twenty-one. The Munich clock is on the corner of the ground.

Forty people see the Sex Pistols. On 4 June the band play the Lesser Free Trade Hall to a very small room containing, among others, the future members of Joy Division, the Fall and the Smiths, and a television presenter named Tony Wilson. It is the most consequential small gig in British history.

The Haçienda opens. Factory Records opens FAC 51 on Whitworth Street West, funded by New Order’s record sales. It loses money for six years, then acid house arrives and it becomes the most important club in Britain. It closes in 1997. The site is now flats.

Metrolink. Britain’s first modern street-running light rail system opens between Bury and Altrincham through the city centre. It now runs to around a hundred stops and is the backbone of getting around.

The bomb. On 15 June the IRA detonates 1,500 kg of explosive on Corporation Street — the largest peacetime explosion in Britain. A coded warning and a mass evacuation mean nobody is killed, though 200 are injured. It destroys a large part of the retail centre and, brutally, releases the money and the political will to redesign it.

The Commonwealth Games. Manchester hosts the Games after two failed Olympic bids, building a stadium in derelict east Manchester that becomes the Etihad the following year. It is the regeneration model the city has used ever since.

The Arena attack. On 22 May a suicide bomb at the end of an Ariana Grande concert kills 22 people, many of them children. The city’s worker bee, on the coat of arms since 1842, becomes the symbol of the response. The Glade of Light memorial stands beside the cathedral.

Two openings. Manchester Museum reopens in February after a £15 million rebuild, with a new South Asia Gallery and a public repatriation of 174 objects to Aboriginal communities. Aviva Studios opens in October at £242 million against a £110 million budget.

The buses come back. The final tranche of Greater Manchester’s bus network transfers to public control in January, completing the Bee Network — the first English region outside London to take its buses back into franchise, with capped fares shared across bus and tram.