Manchester & the Industrial Revolution.
During the Industrial Revolution the powerhouse that was Manchester became the hub of a wide network of many small Lancashire townships – “little Manchesters” as they were sometimes known – towns that serviced the city’s massive cotton industry. Places 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 newly created Manchester Ship Canal, and received raw materials which were distributed out from the city and its well established system of canals and railways.Steam power drove the Victorian city, with water from the many local rivers like the Irwell, Medlock, Irk and Tame, and coal from Worsley via the Duke of Egerton’s Bridgewater Canal to Castlefield, or other coal pits around Wigan.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. Even today, Manchester is marked by its many fine surviving warehouses (now mostly hotels and executive apartments) and mills (now frequently relegated to small industrial units). 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.
Greater Manchester
In the 1970s, Greater Manchester was born – a still controversial grouping of 8 boroughs and 2 cities, which were subsumed into one large administrative connurbation, the Metropolian County of Greater Manchester. Two of these, Tameside and Trafford, were newly created (again, quite controversially) for the purpose, while other former County Boroughs like Bury, Oldham and Rochdale (in Lancashire) and Stockport (in Cheshire) lost their administrative independence to a large degree to the new Metropolitan County. This “county” still produces more than half of Britain‘s manufactured goods and consumables, though manufacturing continues its steady decline. 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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