Welcome to Manchester
Manchester is a relatively new city. It was born of the
Industrial Revolution
when it came to the forefront of world textile manufacture and
production, a position it held until the 1960s. It is a vibrant
dynamic city, one of the largest metropolitan conurbations in the
United Kingdom, proud of its
history and heritage,
its
culture
and its
entrepreneurial spirit.
In more recent times, it has had to reconfigure its traditional
manufacturing base to develop thriving new technologies.
The original
Manchester
was an old town which has been inhabited since Roman times, when
General
Julius Agricola
built a fort just north of the site of present day
city,
though it was not until the 18th century that this hitherto remote
and inconspicuous little town sprang into the forefront of world
attention, and not until the mid-19th century that it became a city.
During the Industrial Revolution Manchester became the hub of a wide
network of innumerable townships which serviced its massive cotton
industry - surrounding towns like Blackburn, Burnley,
Bolton,
Wigan,
Salford,
Oldham
and
Rochdale,
(to name but a few) sent their woven and spun produce to the
Exchange in Manchester and from thence to the world via the
Manchester Ship Canal,
and received raw materials which were distributed out from the city
and its well established system of
canals and railways.
The City of Manchester and innumerable
small satellite towns and villages
surrounding it saw the rapid growth of factories manufacturing
merchandise for cotton weaving and spinning, dyeing, fulling and all
apects of the textile industry. Manchester was nicknamed "Cottonopolis"
where 'King Cotton' ruled. It held onto its reputation as the prime
source of world textiles until its decline in the 1950s, when
cheaper foreign imports sounded the death knell for the region's
pre-eminence.
In the 1970s,
Greater Manchester
was born - a still controversial grouping of 8 towns and 2 cities
which were subsumed into one large administrative connurbation, the
Metropolian County of Greater Manchester. The county still produces
more than half of Britain's manufactured goods and consumables.
Greater Manchester is a big place. While 2.6 million people live
within its actual boundaries, over 7 million others live in the
wider region, making it second only to London in Great Britain. For
11 million people living within 50 miles of the City of Manchester,
it is the place where they come to work, or to shop or to visit the
many attractions and
entertainments
which only a large dynamic city such as this could hope to offer.
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