It dominates the North of England on a plain separating the Peak District to the South from the sweeping moorlands of Yorkshire to the Northeast, and the meres and mountains of the Lake District in the Northwest. Lacking the vistas that make this neighboring countryside arguably the most beautiful in England, Manchester is not picturesque in any immediate way. Though bejeweled with gems of architecture, itbejeweled with gems of architecture, it has neither the all-of-a-piece style that gives Bath its elegance nor the higgledy-piggledy charm that makes old market towns such as Chester so alluring. Home to Britain’s largest university, Manchester hasn’t the panoply of beautiful colleges that draws visitors to Oxford and Cambridge; its cathedral is handsome, but not as magnificent as those in Salisbury or Durham, nor as dramatic as the two from the 20th century that soar over Liverpool. Nonetheless, like a toy box, Manchester is packed with intriguing things to amuse, and visitors who dig deep into its treasures will be generously rewarded—not only with pleasure but also with new insight into the ways Manchester has shaped 21st-century England.

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Manchester did none of this shaping until 1,600 years or so after its founding in ad 79 by the Roman legions who called it Mamucium. After the Romans left in 410, nothing more was heard of it until the Middle Ages, when it reappeared in recorded history as Manchester. By the 13th century it was a borough whose residents paid taxes, rather than owing duty to their lord. This gave them economic freedoms, and like their descendents centuries later, they clearly turned them to advantage because 16th-century traveler John Leland called Manchester “the best builded, quikkest and most populous tounne of Lancastreshire.”

Leland’s word “quikkest” meant most vigorous. Already a producer of linen, by 1552 Manchester and surrounding towns were famous for producing cotton goods. One reason was that the damp atmosphere of the Northwest helps to prevent threads from breaking as they are processed. Just as significantly, Manchester could harness fast Pennine streams for power. Then, when the age of steam got underway in the late 18th century, nearby mines supplied coal to run textile machines invented by Northern men such as John Kay, Richard Arkwright and Richard Crompton.

Machines vastly increased the quantity of cotton that could be spun and woven. Steam power could not be supplied to the cottages where spinners and weavers traditionally labored, however, so the workers had to move into the immense factories clanging with incessant machinery. Those mills quickly became a hallmark of Manchester, as did its forest of chimneys and the pall of smoke trapped over the city by the nearby mountains. It also became known for its people: for rich mill-owners—the dot-com entrepreneurs of their day—who saw and exploited the new technology; and for weary factory workers, most of them women and children, who labored as many as 70 or 80 hours a week. The living and working conditions were so dire that in 1842 the average age of death among Manchester’s working class was 17.

Many visitors were appalled. In 1849 American visitor Henry Colman wrote of “exhibitions of the most disgusting and loathsome forms of destitution and utter vice and profligacy.” Further details would make his very paper “offensive to the touch,” he feared. Charles Dickens provided a snapshot of a northern cotton-manufacturing city in his book Hard Times: “You saw nothing in Coketown [assumed to be Manchester] but what was severely workful….It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of un-natural red and black like the painted face of a savage.” Most famously, Friedrich Engels, one of many German businessmen who made their home in Manchester, fueled Karl Marx’s economic theories with his Condition of the Working Class in England, which laid bare the fearful working conditions and “the disgraceful unhealthy slums of Manchester.”

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