Manchester’s Industrial Heritage

Michael Nevell provides an overview of the survival of Manchester’s industrial face, helping to tell the physical story of the world’s first industrial city.

Manchester was the world’s first industrial city, the shock city of the Victorian age. Its nineteenth-century dominance of world cotton production, as Cottonopolis, saw its city region emerge as one of the largest urban areas in Europe. The city continues to re-invent itself in the post-industrial era, but there is a rich industrial heritage legacy that is still visible, from the Northern Quarter to Ardwick. There are dozens of eighteenth-century weavers’ cottages hiding in plain sight, whilst many of the textile mills of Ancoats and Chorlton-on-Medlock, often converted into apartments, still stand as markers of the city’s role as a textile-manufacturing colossus. Elsewhere in the city, you can find buildings associated with brewing, glass-making, electricity generation, warehousing, and water supply, often in the shadow of the of the twenty-first-century city’s renaissance. Its internationally important canal and railway buildings and structures, saved during the 1970s and 1980s, now provide offices, homes, and leisure facilities for the growing city-centre population. In this wide-ranging book Michael Nevell provides an overview of the surprising and often breathtaking survival of Manchester’s industrial face, helping to tell the physical story of the world’s first industrial city.