The three big moments that made Manchester what it is today

“Manchester’s story is one of birth, growth in Victorian grandeur, catastrophic decline in the 1980s and recent recovery. The eyes of the world are on it again as it has become a test case for how post-industrial cities can reinvent themselves.”

In his new book, Brian Groom, an author who grew up in and around Manchester and now lives in Saddleworth, attempts to provide a definitive history of a city whose recent economic growth and glittering skyscrapers have drawn envious glances from many other parts of the country.

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The former Financial Times journalist hit the bestseller list two years ago with his book ‘Northerners’ which chronicles the entire north of England.

Now he has turned his attention to writing a history of Britain’s second city through the people who made it, from campaigners such as Emmeline Pankhurst, industrialists and Tony Wilson, the founder of Factory Records.

Speaking on The Northern Agenda podcast about ‘Made In Manchester: A People’s History of the City that Shaped the Modern World’, Mr Groom picks out three periods in Manchester’s history that have made it what it is today.

Hear Brian Groom talk about his book at the link below:

“Prototype of an Industrial City”

“First of all, the obvious one is the end of the 18th century, the beginning of the 19th century. It is around this time that the great Lancashire industrialist Richard Arkwright gave the town its first cotton mill in 1781.

“And this was a source of wonder, and crowds flocked every day to see the raising of his huge chimney. And by 1800, there were dozens of them. And by the 1840s, it had become the prototype of the industrial city, especially in terms of the growth of factories.

“No one has seen anything like this. And no one knew what its implications would be.

“People were coming to see what was going on here: ‘Is our world going to be like this? Is there money to be made from it? We will all starve, what will happen?” I didn’t know it was a very, very exciting time.”

“Who let them do that?”

After the city’s rapid rise during the industrial revolution, the period between the 1960s and 1990s saw a painful decline for Manchester, says Mr Groom.

“During that time, I think Manchester is not the only place that had this problem, but Manchester’s revival was hampered by a rather disastrous 20-year experiment with modernist architecture, particularly in public housing, particularly the infamous crescents of at Hulme, who were stupid. poorly designed, poorly manufactured and poorly built.

“Architects Journal described them as the worst housing stock in Europe and they were eventually demolished in the early 1990s. There were similar problems on a smaller scale among other inner-city developments.

“And then there is the Arndale shopping centre, still there but in its original form when it was built in the 1970s, replacing a medieval pattern of streets. The developers requested that the building be enclosed with little natural light and no exterior storefronts.

“The result was an exterior of concrete panels covered in yellow tiles, which Mancunians immediately began to deride as the world’s largest toilet block.

“There’s a wonderful story that a journalist met an old LS Lowry at the time who was standing outside and he was looking and shaking his head and saying, ‘Who let them do that?’

“But the city got through it, the people proved resilient, and the city learned some lessons from the mistakes of that time.”

Regeneration of the 21st century

Manchester’s recovery period began in the mid-1990s, Mr Groom says, with some dating it to the 1996 IRA bomb.

“But the regeneration efforts started a bit earlier with some tenders for the Olympics and some regeneration of the Castlefield area around the old Roman fort.

“But when you move into the 21st century, then we’ve had strong growth in jobs, economic output and population despite a recession, a pandemic and a European war.

“And that renaissance has involved a lot of projects focused on leisure, culture and lifestyle, not the only city to do this, cities like Barcelona and Bilbao have come back through this method, but a key focus from the beginning was to try to win over the government. funding competitions and European grants – particularly important in the early days of Manchester’s uprising.”

Made In Manchester: A Popular History of the City That Shaped the Modern World by Brian Groom is out now