Manchester: The First Industrial City

Manchester grew so quickly on cotton that it earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'. Mills, warehouses and canals crowded its center, and its population swelled with migrants from the countryside and from Ireland. Visitors came from across Europe and America to see the future. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting in 1835, wrote that from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flowed out to fertilize the whole world, capturing the city's mix of wealth and squalor.

Manchester also became a center of new ideas: free-trade campaigners of the Anti-Corn Law League worked there, and Friedrich Engels studied its working class. The city's wealth was unevenly shared, with merchants moving to leafy suburbs while workers lived in crowded districts. Manchester became a symbol both of industrial progress and of its social problems.