The world's first industrial suburb, then the worst slum in England, now the most expensive postcode in Manchester.
Ancoats has a reasonable claim to being the world’s first industrial suburb — the first place anywhere where a large population lived in dense housing built specifically to serve steam-powered factories they walked to.
The Rochdale Canal arrived in the 1790s and the mills went up along it: Murrays’ Mills (1798), McConnel and Kennedy, Beehive Mill, Royal Mill. They are enormous, plain, eight-storey brick blocks, and at the time they were the largest industrial buildings on earth.
What it was like
Appalling. Friedrich Engels walked these streets in 1842, when he was twenty-two and working in his father’s Salford mill, and The Condition of the Working Class in England is substantially a description of Ancoats and the courts around it.
Cellar dwellings, no drainage, the Irk and the Medlock running black. Life expectancy in the district was in the twenties. Cholera came in 1832 and again in 1849.
It also had a large Italian community from the 1880s — Little Italy, concentrated around Blossom Street, which is why St Michael’s church stood where it did and why the Whit Walk processions mattered here.
The slums were cleared through the twentieth century, the mills closed, and by the 1990s Ancoats was largely derelict — mills standing empty with trees on the roofs, one of the most striking urban ruins in Europe.
What it is now
Regeneration arrived in the 2000s, stalled in the financial crisis, and then arrived properly.
Cutting Room Square is the centre of it: a hard-landscaped public square surrounded by converted mills, and one of the densest clusters of good restaurants in Manchester. Rudy’s started here and is now everywhere. Mana holds a Michelin star, the first in Manchester for over forty years. Elnecot, Sugo, Erst and Higher Ground are all within a few minutes.
New Islington next door has a marina, a much-photographed set of coloured apartment blocks by Will Alsop, and a well-used park.
The honest bit
This is now among the most expensive property in Greater Manchester, and the social housing that was promised through several rounds of the regeneration has substantially not materialised. That argument is live and it is not a small one.
It is also, straightforwardly, a very good place to walk around and eat. The scale of the mills is genuinely startling when you are standing under one, and there is nowhere else in Britain where you can see the beginning of industrial urban life this clearly.
The Marble Arch is at the top of Rochdale Road, ten minutes away.
