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The City of Manchester is a major city and metropolitan borough in the North of England, historically notable for its central role in the Industrial Revolution. Today it is a centre of the arts, the media, higher education and commerce and considered by some to ... more »
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Airports The City of Manchester is a major city and metropolitan borough in the North of England, historically notable for its central role in the Industrial Revolution. Today it is a centre of the arts, the media, higher education and commerce and considered by some to be the country's second city. The (administrative) city has a population of 437,000, whilst the Greater Manchester Urban Area is home to 2,240,230 people.
Manchester is also well-known for its sporting connections, being home to the world famous Manchester United football club, Manchester City football club and the Lancashire County Cricket Club, and having hosted the XVII Commonwealth Games in 2002.
Manchester city centre is on a "tentative list" of UNESCO World Heritage Sites—mainly based around its network of canals and mills, which facilitated its development during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century.
Manchester is situated within a bowl-shaped land area, bordered to the north and east by the Pennine moors and to the south by the Cheshire Plain. The city centre is located on the east bank of the River Irwell, near the confluence of the River Medlock and the River Irk. The River Mersey also flows through the south of the city. Much of the inner city, especially in the south, is flat, offering extensive views of the moors from the floors of many tall buildings. 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 has a large number of office buildings, and its Central Business District is currently located in the centre of the city, adjacent to Piccadilly, focused on Mosley Street, Deansgate, King Street and Piccadilly. However, new office space is appearing at a rapid pace throughout the city, as its reputation as a high quality European Business Centre increases. Spinningfields is a large new development on land west of Deansgate, which will be a large, modern business centre, and home to several headquarters, squares and cafes. The first building to be produced on the site was the Royal Bank of Scotland's new headquarters on Deansgate. The project is being spear-headed by Sir Norman Foster. Other buildings include a 110 metre tall office building, a new justice centre and new Crown Court, to be built over the next few years.
Things to do
Manchester is the main retail centre of the North. There are two large shopping malls; the Manchester Arndale Centre in the middle of the city and the out-of-town Trafford Centre. The city centre has a number of smaller shopping centres, including The Triangle, which caters for a more youthful and upmarket clientele and the Royal Exchange Centre. Manchester also has one of the largest ASDA-WalMart supercentres in the UK, close to the City of Manchester Stadium in Eastlands.
In the central shopping area of the city centre, road access is all but impossible, making journeys around the city on foot quicker, safer and more convenient. The pedestrianised Market Street forms the core of the city centre's retail area. It is dominated on the north side by the Manchester Arndale and a branch of Debenhams.
The Shambles contains a branch of Harvey Nichols, a Marks and Spencer store, and a branch of Selfridges, as well as a variety of upmarket designer boutiques.
Deansgate also has many shops, including the department store House of Fraser (formerly Kendals), along with pubs and bars. King Street is an affluent shopping area where many exclusive fashion brands have stores. King Street also has many notable buildings preserved in a conservation area. Other hubs in the centre include St Ann's Square, and Exchange Square.
Former stores, since gone, include Lewis's, Henry's, and Affleck and Brown. The building that housed the latter is now known as Affleck’s Palace. It consists of low-cost stalls for independent traders and creatives. Affleck’s is located on Oldham Street, in the Northern Quarter, along with a range of independent music, clothing and other shops.
* The Bridgewater Hall, home of the Hallé Orchestra * The Corn Exchange (now the Triangle shopping centre) * The G-Mex Centre * John Rylands Library, Deansgate * London Road Fire Station * Manchester Central Library, St Peter’s Square, by E. Vincent Harris * Manchester Town Hall by Alfred Waterhouse, extended by E. Vincent Harris * Midland Bank building (now HSBC Bank plc), King Street by Sir Edwin Lutyens * The Midland Hotel * Piccadilly Gardens by Tadao Ando * Palace Hotel * The Portico Library * The Royal Exchange * South Manchester Synagogue * Strangeways Prison by Waterhouse * Sunlight House * Trinity Bridge over River Irwell by Santiago Calatrava * Victoria station * The Victoria Baths * Urbis Museum designed by Ian Simpson
Airport
Manchester International Airport, formerly Manchester Ringway Airport, is the third busiest airport in the UK in terms of passengers per year and is served by a dedicated railway station. In 2005 the airport handled 22.1 million passengers and provided direct flights to over 180 destinations worldwide by over 90 airlines. Long haul scheduled destinations served directly from Manchester include New York ( JFK and Newark ), Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, Houston, Las Vegas, Toronto, Port of Spain, Antigua, Barbados, Damascus, Dubai, Abu Dhabi (starting Spring 2006), Doha, Tehran, Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and (resuming in 2006), Hong Kong. There are also firm plans for direct services to Beijing and Bangkok. Many European and domestic destinations are served. Manchester to London is the only high density airline route within England and is one of the busiest domestic sectors in Europe providing serious competition for the railways.
The airport has been voted the best airport in the UK by Which Consumer Magazine, Travel Weekly Globe, Business Magazines International and in the Airport World’s Service Excellence Awards (European runner up, second only to Copenhagen).
Barton Aerodrome, one of the world's oldest airports, is still in operation. It is a very busy heliport and has small grass runways which deal with small aircraft. It also has the world's oldest operating control tower.
Road
Manchester like London has a ring road, the M60. Unlike London the M60 actually runs within the Greater Manchester conurbation providing good links, rather than around the conurbation as the M25 (London) does. It has 27 junctions, numbered consecutively clockwise, starting with Junction 1 at Stockport in the south-east of the conurbation. The main motorways serving Manchester are the M56, M6, M61, M62 and M66 motorways. Most of these routes link onto the M60.
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Rail
Manchester holds a pivotal position in railway history as a birthplace of passenger rail travel on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which opened in 1830 after the famous Rainhill Trials chose Stephenson's Rocket to pull the trains. In just 50 years the city centre was encircled by stations and termini, including Manchester London Road, (now Manchester Piccadilly), Manchester Victoria, Manchester Central, Manchester Mayfield and Manchester Exchange. Following the Beeching Report in the 1960s, cutbacks followed, with Manchester Central, Manchester Mayfield and Manchester Exchange closing to passengers. All rail services were then directed to Manchester Victoria and Manchester Piccadilly. High speed trains to London are run from Manchester Piccadilly by Virgin Trains, journeys typically taking around 2 hr 15 min. There are also several smaller stations remaining around the City Centre, including Manchester Oxford Road, Deansgate and Salford Central.
Metrolink
Manchester has a tram system called Metrolink. Operated by Serco, the Metrolink links the city centre to Altrincham, Eccles and Bury. It is a high-frequency service, with trams running every 6–12 minutes. It carries nearly 20 million passengers each year.
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The Manchester area was settled in or before Roman times. In the course of a campaign against the Brigantes, the Roman general Agricola set up a fort at Mancunium on the East bank of the Irwell. This temporary structure was rebuilt several times, and became an important staging post where the roads between the legionary fortresses of Chester and York, and the road northwards, crossed. There was a civilian settlement, or vicus. An extremely rare Christian word square was discovered in excavations some years ago. The North Gate of this fort has been reconstructed on the original site, together with a section of the fortress wall, and these may be found in the Castlefield district, at the end of Deansgate.
The construction of the Duke's Canal, sometimes referred to as the Bridgewater Canal, Britain's first true artificial inland waterway, spurred this development by the provision of abundant quantities of cheap coal. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first main line passenger railway in the world, also contributed to the town's rapid development.
Manchester quickly grew into the most important industrial centre in the world, and, significantly, the first industrial society. The pace of change was fast and frightening. At that time, it seemed a place in which anything could happen — new industrial processes, new ways of thinking (the so called '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. "What Manchester does today," it was said, "the rest of the world does tomorrow."
During the early years of the industrial revolution, as the population soared astronomically, overcrowding in the inner city areas became a serious problem, and the quality of ordinary people's living conditions suffered dramatically. Basic services such as clean water and proper sewage facilities were significantly absent, and the result was chronic sickness and diseases such as cholera and typhoid taking a heavy toll. Infant mortality was horrific; life expectancy for working class adults was very low.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Manchester was an important seat of radical, reformist politics. A famous meeting, held in furtherance of parliamentary reform, took place in St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819. It was to be addressed by Henry Hunt, a powerful speaker known as "Orator Hunt". Local magistrates, fearful of a large crowd, ordered volunteer cavalry armed with sabres to clear a way through the crowd to arrest Hunt and the platform party. They lost control (some reports suggest that many were drunk) and started to lash out at members of the crowd. The officers of a troop of hussars of the British Army were so appalled that they tried to restrain the volunteers. These events resulted in the (official) deaths of eleven people with over four hundred injured. The country was appalled. One of the dead had been present at the Battle of Waterloo, and it was said that "Waterloo were a battle, but Peterloo (as the proceedings were satirically called) were nowt but bloody murder"
During the World War II, Manchester was involved in heavy industrial construction — it was home to Avro (now BAE Systems) which built countless aircraft for the RAF, the most famous being the Avro Lancaster bomber. The city was attacked a number of times by the Luftwaffe, particularly in the "Christmas Blitz" of 1941, which destroyed a large part of the historic city centre and seriously damaged the Cathedral.
In 1974, Manchester was split from the county of Lancashire, and the Metropolitan Borough of Manchester was created.
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; a good example of this transformation is the Manchester Arndale Centre. Many old mills have been converted into apartments, helping to give the city a much more modern, upmarket look and feel. Some areas, like Hulme, have undergone extensive regeneration programmes and many million-pound lofthouse apartments have since been developed to cater for its growing business community. The 168 metre tall, 47-storey Beetham Tower, completed in 2006, provides the highest residential accommodation in the United Kingdom - the lower 23 floors form the Hilton Hotel, while the upper 24 floors are apartments. The Beetham Tower was originally planned to stand 171 metres in height, but this had to be changed due to local wind conditions.
There has long been a thriving nightclub culture in Manchester. UK broadcaster Jimmy Savile is credited as becoming the first modern DJ by using twin turntables for continuous play after he obtained two domestic record decks welded together. He first used this device to play to the public in 1946, at a nightclub called The Ritz on Whitworth Street (which had opened in 1927). Tony Prince is credited as becoming the world's first full-time club DJ in 1964 when Savile, who was then a Mecca manager in Manchester, told him that Top Rank considered him to be the first person to be on their payroll as a pure DJ.
Many teenagers of the 1960s developed a love for Northern Soul, which had as two of its epicentres the Wigan Casino and Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club, and is credited as being instrumental in the development of the Motown Sound.
Manchester has a vibrant and exciting range of restaurants, bars and clubs, spanning the famous "curry mile" in Rusholme to traditional ‘grub’, Chinatown, modern bars and bistros at Deansgate Locks in the city centre. There are now many top class restaurants.
There is a Hard Rock Cafe, chain restaurants such as Wagamama and bars that include Waxy O’Connors and The Living Room. The coffee chain Starbucks has 12 outlets in a 2 mile radius. Other, independent restaurants, bars and clubs can be found in the Northern Quarter area of the city centre.
Regional favourites include the Eccles cake. The traditional pie capital of the UK is supposedly at the heart of Wigan, 15 miles outside the city.
Manchester is also famous for its beer, despite the closure of the Boddingtons brewery in 2005. Keg 'Boddies' is brewed by Interbrew in Luton but cask Boddington's continues to be brewed in the city by Hydes brewery in Moss Side. Hydes is itself a long established independent brewery. Another Manchester brewer is Joseph Holt, whose Derby Brewery in Cheetham is just round the corner from the defunct Boddingtons Strangeways brewery. The Royal Brewery in Moss Side — not far from Hyde's — brews McEwans lager. J W Lees brewery is in Middleton Junction, a few miles north of the city. There are also a notable number of microbreweries producing smaller quantities of high quality beer, cider and perry.
Breweries in Manchester and Salford which closed within the last twenty years include Wilson's, whose Newton Heath brewery closed in the late 1980's, and Whitbread/Chester's in Salford.
* Manchester has a damp climate and a reputation as a rainy city. The average annual rainfall is 809 mm, meaning that its reputation is relatively undeserved. For example, this total is less than that of Plymouth, Cardiff or Glasgow. In international terms, Manchester receives substantially less rain than New York City, which receives 1200 mm of rain in an average year, and its average annual rainfall total is comparable with that of Rome. The precipitation is light, however, so a small volume of rain may take an hour to fall in Manchester, compared to several minutes of heavy rain experienced in Rome. Manchester also has a relatively high humidity level, which is why it is noted for being a fabric town (chiefly manufacturing cotton, but to the south silk).
Temperature - Yearly Average
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Distances are calculated as the crow flies, and are provided as an aid in planning only.
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