When we think of shadows we naturally think of light. As with many things, Manchester has a special tale regarding such matters. The city has a considerable history of various types of light and darkness, especially in relation to its pioneering role in the industrialisation of cities. The coal fires that powered this transformation created huge amounts of soot that were deposited onto the surfaces of buildings. This led to an ‘architecture of darkness’, a couple of examples of which remain to the present day as silent witnesses to the enormous energy that changed the city and its fortunes forever.

Colonial students – and postcolonial students in India’s case – were a source of some anxiety to the British state in the period immediately post-1945. Ostensibly, students were to survive and hopefully to flourish, to study hard and to return to their home country. In the process they would have become a friend of Britain, citizens of one of the members of the ‘family’ of imperial and post-imperial nations beginning to be called ‘the commonwealth’. But would colonial students mix with anticolonial and even Communist Party elements while in Britain, or become disaffected by their experience of racial discrimination, thus returning home radicalised to help lead their country’s agitation against empire? Or, in India’s case, would they drive its post-independence resurgence? Despite these fears, the provision of colonial students’ housing was almost entirely left either in the hands of charities, religious groups, and philanthropists, or to the whims of the market. In 1952 arrived one kind of architectural answer in the form of the Indian YMCA building in Fitzroy Square. Designed by Ralph Tubbs, it is a fascinatingly conflicted building. On the one hand it can be seen as a way of schooling Indian students on how to live in Britain; on the other, it was an exemplification of the benefits that the British might gain from Indian students. This chapter discusses how the Indian YMCA building was concerned with making accommodations and being accommodated; about showing how to be Indian in Britain, and how the British might be a little more Indian.

As industrialisation changed the character of Manchester, increasing interest was expressed in evidence for a past which was rapidly disappearing. Reproduction of local historic buildings at an exhibition in 1887 was one manifestation, while repair and conservation of medieval buildings in the city aimed to restore their original appearance. The Shambles buildings, formerly part of the medieval market, were moved and rebuilt not once, but twice: following 1970s redevelopment and again after the IRA bomb in 1996. These buildings and events can be seen as symbols of the city’s changing relationship with its past in a manner which invites study and interrogation.

A mix of extracts from the author’s novel, Before The Fire – set in Manchester during the summer of the UK riots in 2011 – and reflections on their meaning, or lack of meaning. The piece thinks through the narratives assigned to the riots and the deep societal conflicts they revealed.

The bridge crossing the River Tay at Aberfeldy in Perthshire connects southern Scotland to the Highlands. It is an important piece of historic transport infrastructure. More than that, however, it is an architectural monument to the making of North Britain, built in the 1730s by British military engineers serving under General Wade to a design by leading Scottish architect William Adam. It marks the beginning of a process that through the next century transformed the Highlands from a geographically and culturally distinct place into the northern part of North Britain. There is a multicentred, multifaceted process of political, economic, and cultural colonisation that can be read into the relationship between landscape and built environment in this transformation process: military pacification brought forts, roads, bridges, and inns; land clearances removed indigenous peoples and introduced new settlement patterns and house forms; and, finally, cultural tourism brought hotels and shooting lodges. Drawing comparisons with colonial activities in Ireland and North America, this chapter will present the inns, farms, hotels, villages, roads, bridges, and harbours of the Scottish Highlands as interconnected acts in the expansion of the British frontier to the northern edge of the British Isles.

Works of art by internationally significant artists can be seen freely and accessibly in Greater Manchester, without even having to step foot inside an art gallery or museum. Visiting key works by artists including the British sculptors Elisabeth Frink and Gertrude Hermes, and the conceptual artists Gustav Metzger and Ryan Gander, this chapter explores the history of public art commissioning in Greater Manchester. It discusses a variety of aims of placing artworks in public places – from public parks to Manchester Airport – showing how these range from decoration and celebration, to interaction and participation, to placemaking and tourism.

Public transport, threat and conviviality in twenty-first century nocturnal Manchester. Night workers and leisure industry consumers converge in post-midnight public spaces. Costs and externalities in public transport microeconomic price mechanisms. Navigating public space during times of high delinquency and intoxication: the role of the citizen and the security apparatus of the state. Interpersonal negotiation at municipal transport nodes; night-time religious offerings and profanities witnessed at late-night bus stops. A participant-observer’s insight. Civic society and contrasting understandings of personal space and private–public boundaries of intimacy-showing in racialised societies after midnight in urban public spaces.

This section begins with a discussion of the principal objectives and concepts underpinning the study, and well as the intellectual and historiographic context within which the study is situated. Here the notion of ‘inner empire’ is both explained and justified as a scholarly framework. It then proceeds to an overview of scholarship to date, highlighting key moments in the development of the field. Finally, it outlines the content of the book, chapter by chapter.

With reference to a site in Gorton, east Manchester, this chapter highlights how, without regular maintenance and other processes of ordering, a former industrially productive site can offer a variety of affordances, and, over time, transform into a verdant wildscape. In so doing, it reveals the multiple temporalities – some conflicting, some complimentary – that shape the city.