Manchester

Manchester began as Mamucium, a Roman fort whose fragments remain visible in Castlefield. Before industrialisation it was already trading textiles, exporting cotton goods to Africa as a means of paying for enslaved people in the transatlantic slave trade.

Industry transformed it. The Bridgewater Canal brought coal into the town from 1761, and steam-powered cotton mills made Manchester the world's largest marketplace for cotton goods, dubbed "Cottonopolis" and "Warehouse City" in the Victorian era. In 1819 soldiers charged a peaceful crowd of protesters in St Peter's Square, killing at least 18 and injuring more than 700 in the Peterloo Massacre. The city became one end of the world's first intercity passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester, and the Manchester Ship Canal, opened in 1894, linked the city to the Irish Sea.

After the Second World War deindustrialisation brought a long decline. Regeneration began in the late 1980s with the Metrolink trams, the Bridgewater Hall and the Manchester Arena. On 15 June 1996 a lorry bomb exploded on Corporation Street, one of the most costly man-made disasters in history; rebuilding, aided by the 2002 Commonwealth Games, remade the city centre. In October 2025 two Jewish people were killed in an attack outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation synagogue.

Music is the city's best-known export. The Hallé orchestra dates from the Victorian era, and the city has two symphony orchestras, the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic. In the 1980s Manchester drove British indie music, led by the Smiths and later the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays and James; the Madchester scene centred on the Haçienda nightclub of Factory Records founder Tony Wilson, and Oasis formed in the city in 1991.

Football matters enormously. Manchester United play at Old Trafford and Manchester City at the City of Manchester Stadium, and the rivalry runs through the whole conurbation. Lancashire County Cricket Club plays at Old Trafford Cricket Ground, about half a mile from United's ground.

The city is diverse and open. Pubs on and near Canal Street acquired a predominantly gay clientele in the 20th century, and the Gay Village has hosted Manchester Pride each August since 1985. Greater Manchester has the largest Jewish population in Britain outside London, there is a well-established Chinatown, and Moss Side, Longsight, Cheetham Hill and Rusholme are centres of the city's ethnic minority communities. Since 2007 the city has hosted the biennial Manchester International Festival.

The city had a population of over 589,000 in 2024, at the centre of the Greater Manchester Built-up Area of about 2.87 million. Its population is younger than the English average, with the largest student population in Europe.

The economy has grown fast: annual growth of 3.1 per cent between 2015 and 2025 was double the national average. The city is known for its links to media, science and engineering, with the BBC among the tenants of MediaCityUK in neighbouring Salford. In 2025 the city overtook London in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index. Yet in 2021 only 53.5 per cent of over-16s were in work, and the gap between the booming centre and poorer districts remains.

Greater Manchester has an elected mayor overseeing transport and policing, and in 2024 the mayor's budget was £2.6 billion. Former mills in the centre have been converted into apartments, while most residents live in the terraced and suburban districts reached by tram and bus. Manchester Town Hall, closed since 2018 for refurbishment, is scheduled to reopen in spring 2027.

Manchester's own sweet baking includes the Manchester tart, a pastry case of jam and custard topped with coconut, and the Eccles cake, a flaky pastry round filled with currants, named after the town of Eccles. Vimto, the fruit cordial, was invented in the city in 1908. Lancashire hotpot, a slow-baked stew of lamb and onions topped with sliced potatoes, and black pudding from nearby Bury belong to the wider region's table.

Migration has shaped the city's eating. The Curry Mile on Wilmslow Road in Rusholme is lined with South Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants, and the well-established Chinatown around Faulkner Street, the second largest in the United Kingdom, serves a city with the third-largest Chinese population in Europe. Cheetham Hill and Longsight have their own shops and restaurants.

In the centre, the Northern Quarter is known for independent cafés and bars in old warehouse streets, and the Christmas markets fill the squares with food and drink stalls in winter. Robinsons, a family-run brewery founded in Stockport in 1849, owns around 250 pubs, mostly in North West England.