Manchester Totally Explained

    Manchester (pronounced ) is a city and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. The City of Manchester metropolitan borough, which has city status, has a population of 452,000. Manchester lies at the centre of the wider Greater Manchester Urban Area which has a population of 2,240,230, the United Kingdom's third largest conurbation. It is also the second largest urban zone in the UK and the fourteenth most populated in Europe.
   Forming part of the English Core Cities Group, and often described as the "Capital of the North", Manchester today is a centre of the arts, the media, higher education and commerce. In a recent poll of British business leaders, Manchester was regarded as the best place to locate business in the UK. A report commissioned by Manchester Partnership, published in 2007, showed Manchester to be the "fastest-growing city" economically. It is the third most visited city in the United Kingdom by foreign visitors and is now often considered to be the second city of the UK. Manchester was the host of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and among its other sporting connections are its two Premier League football teams, Manchester United and Manchester City.
   It is claimed that Manchester was the world's first industrialised city and is notable for the central role it played during the Industrial Revolution. It was the dominant international centre of textile manufacture and cotton spinning. During the 19th century it acquired the nickname Cottonopolis,

History

Toponymy

The name Manchester came from the Roman name Mamucium, thought to be a Latinisation of an original Celtic name (possibly meaning "breast-like hill" from mamm- = "breast"), plus Anglo-Saxon ceaster = "town", which is derived from Latin castra = "camp".

Early history

There are few signs of prehistoric occupation of the city. The only major Bronze age finds have been to south of the city, where the remains of an extensive farming community were discovered during the construction of Manchester Airport's second runway.
   Central Manchester has been settled since at least Roman times. The Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola constructed a fort called Mamucium in the 70s AD on a defensible hill where the River Medlock meets the River Irwell, at the junction of roads to Chester, York, Buxton, Ribchester, and Melandra. A stabilised fragment of foundations of the final version of the fort is visible in Castlefield. The Romans withdrew in the early fifth century, and by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 the focus of settlement had shifted to the confluence of the rivers Irwell and Irk. Much of the wider area was laid waste in the subsequent Harrying of the North.
   Thomas de la Warre, lord of the manor, founded and constructed a collegiate church for the parish in 1421. The church is now Manchester Cathedral; the domestic premises of the college now house Chetham's School of Music and Chetham's Library. Manchester became an important centre for the manufacture and trade of woollens and linen, and by about 1540, had expanded to become, in John Leland's words, "The fairest, best builded, quickest, and most populous town of all Lancashire." The area was dubbed "Cottonopolis" in its honour.
   Manchester developed a wide range of industries, so that by 1835 "Manchester was without challenge the first and greatest industrial city in the world."
   At that time, it seemed a place in which anything could happen—new industrial processes, new ways of thinking (the Manchester School, promoting free trade and laissez-faire), new classes or groups in society, new religious sects, and new forms of labour organisation. It attracted educated visitors from all parts of Britain and Europe. A saying capturing this sense of innovation survives today: "What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow." As well as being a centre of capitalism, the city has seen its fair share of rebellions by the working and non-titled classes; the most famous were the events on St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819, which have become known as Peterloo. The first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester (at the Mechanics' Institute, David Street), from 2 to 6 June 1868. Manchester was the subject of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Engels himself spending much of his life in and around Manchester. Manchester was also an important cradle of the Labour Party and the Suffragette Movement.
   Manchester's golden age was perhaps the last quarter of the 19th century. Many of the great public buildings (including the Town Hall) date from then. The city's cosmopolitan atmosphere contributed to a vibrant culture, which included the Hallé Orchestra. In 1889, when county councils were created in England, the municipal borough became a county borough with even greater autonomy. During this period, the Manchester Ship Canal was created by the canalisation of the Rivers Irwell and Mersey for from Salford to the Mersey estuary. This enabled ocean going ships to sail right into the Port of Manchester. On the canal's banks, just outside the borough, the world's first industrial estate was created at Trafford Park. and employed over 3,000 men, but the canal was unable to handle the increasingly large container ships. Traffic declined, and the port closed in 1982.
   In 1913, 65% of the world's cotton was processed in the area, Manchester Cathedral was among the buildings seriously damaged; its restoration took 20 years.

1996 bomb

Manchester has a history of attacks attributed to Irish Republicans, including the Manchester Martyrs of 1867, arson in 1920, a series of explosions in 1939, and two bombs in 1992. On Saturday 15 June 1996, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a large bomb adjacent to a department store in the city centre. The largest to be detonated on British soil, the bomb caused over 200 injuries, heavily damaged nearby buildings, and broke windows half a mile away. The cost of the immediate damage was initially estimated at GB£50 million, but this was quickly revised upwards. The final insurance payout has been estimated at over GB£400 million; many affected businesses never recovered from the loss of trade.

Redevelopment

Spurred by the investment after the 1996 bomb, and aided by the XVII Commonwealth Games, Manchester's city centre has undergone extensive regeneration. New and renovated complexes such as The Printworks and the Triangle have become popular shopping and entertainment destinations. The Manchester Arndale is the UK's largest city centre shopping mall.
Large sections of the city dating from the 1960s have been either demolished and re-developed or modernised with the use of glass and steel. Old mills have been converted into modern apartments, Hulme has undergone extensive regeneration programmes, and million-pound lofthouse apartments have since been developed. The 169-metre tall, 47-storey Beetham Tower, completed in 2006, is the tallest building in the UK outside London and highest residential accommodation in the Western Europe. The lower 23 floors form the Hilton Hotel, featuring a 'sky bar' on the 23rd floor. Its upper 24 floors are apartments. In January 2007, the independent Casino Advisory Panel awarded Manchester a licence to build the only supercasino in the UK to regenerate the Eastlands area of the city, but in March the House of Lords rejected the decision by three votes rendering previous House of Commons acceptance meaningless. This left the supercasino, and fourteen other smaller concessions, in parliamentary limbo until a final decision was made. On 11 July 2007, a source close to the government declared the entire supercasino project "dead in the water". A member of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce professed himself "amazed and a bit shocked" and that "there has been an awful lot of time and money wasted". After a meeting with the Prime Minister, Manchester City Council issued a press release on 24 July 2007 stating that "contrary to some reports the door isn't closed to a regional casino".

Governance

Manchester is represented by three tiers of government, Manchester City Council ("local"), UK Parliament ("national"), and European Parliament ("Europe"). Greater Manchester County Council administration was abolished in 1986, and so the city is effectively a unitary authority. Since its inception in 1995, Manchester has been a member of the English Core Cities Group, which, amongst other things, serves to promote the social, cultural and economic status of the city at an international level.
The town of Manchester was granted a charter by Thomas Grelley in 1301 but lost its borough status in a court case of 1359. Until the 19th century, local government was largely provided by manorial courts, the last of which ended in 1846. From a very early time, the township of Manchester lay within the historic county boundaries of Lancashire. It was this separation that resulted in Salford becoming the judicial seat of Salfordshire, which included the ancient parish of Manchester. Manchester later formed its own Poor Law Union by the name of Manchester. The River Mersey flows through the south of Manchester. Much of the inner city, especially in the south, is flat, offering extensive views from many highrise buildings in the city of the foothills and moors of the Pennines, which can often be capped with snow in the winter months. Manchester's geographic features were highly influential in its early development as the world's first industrial city. These features are its climate, its proximity to a seaport at Liverpool, the availability of water power from its rivers, and its nearby coal reserves.
Manchester experiences a temperate maritime climate, like much of the British Isles, with relatively cool summers and mild winters. There is regular but generally light precipitation throughout the year. The city's average annual rainfall is 806.6 mm compared to the UK average of 1125.0 mm, and its mean rain days are 140.4 per annum, notably the A62 road via Oldham and Standedge, the A57 (Snake Pass) towards Sheffield, and the M62 over Saddleworth Moor.

Demography

Manchester Compared
UK Census 2001	Manchester	Greater Manchester	England
Total population	441,200	2,547,700	49,138,831
Foreign born	15%	7.2%	9.2%
White	81%	91%	91%
Asian	9.1%	5.7%	4.6%
Black	4.5%	1.2%	2.3%
Christian	62%	74%	72%
Muslim	9.1%	5.0%	3.1%
Hindu	0.7%	0.7%	1.1%
No religion	16%	11%	15%
Over 75 years old	6.4%	7.0%	7.5%
Unemployed	5.0%	3.5%	3.3%

The United Kingdom Census 2001 showed a total resident population for Manchester of 392,819, a 9.2% decline from the 1991 census. Approximately 83,000 were aged under 16, 285,000 were aged 16–74, and 25,000 aged 75 and over.

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