On the south side of Leadenhall Street in London, where Richard Rogers’s Lloyds building now rises, a major three-year refurbishment project was completed in 1729. Assorted buildings, cellars, and yards on the site had served as the headquarters of the English East India Company since the late 1630s, and steadily accumulated in both size and renown under the name of East India House. A design approved in 1726 was to transform a tangled enclave with timber-framed frontage into a more orderly plan adorned with a ‘stately’ stone façade. Inside were ‘Spacious Rooms, very commodious for such a publick Concern’. By far the most discussed feature of this significant rebuild is the surviving series of paintings depicting the company’s overseas settlements. However, little attempt has been made to rei and read the interior as its early viewers would have done; that is, through the opening frames of the imperial capital’s streetscape and the corporation’s contemporary façade, and through the lens of the specific commercial and political concerns of the day. Taking as its cue shifting viewpoints (in both space and time) implied in eighteenth-century travel guides and accounts, this chapter looks again at the 1729 refurbishment of East India House, the paintings produced shortly afterwards, and the interior of which they were a part, in the context of changing concepts of nation and empire. Reuniting building, painting, and other furnishings in a single visual field, the chapter situates and studies them as part of the integrated architectural setting of company, city, and colonial settlements.

This chapter introduces the principal themes of the book: first, what constitutes Manchester’s identity as a city and urban region; second, how its current development is changing the urban core; and third, how urban planning might be influenced more broadly by the experiences of the city’s inhabitants. Using poetic readings of Manchester’s rain as a way into a wider understanding of the city, the chapter also introduces the sixty words that make up the book and outlines their organisation into eleven themed sections.

This chapter investigates Manchester City Football Club’s now demolished former stadium, Maine Road, Moss Side. A discussion of the economic and social processes that influenced the club’s relocation to the City of Manchester Stadium in 2003, part of the broader transformation of Britain’s sporting landscape, is followed by a description of the stadium and its surroundings. The densely packed terraced housing, the numerous eateries and pubs and manifold modes of access, made this a richly atmospheric, sensual setting on match days, saturated with numerous social activities. The second part of the chapter focuses on the residues of this stadium that remain: sites of naming and commemoration, and the material and topographical traces.

Manchester is not a city readily associated with green space. Yet, in order to alleviate inner-city slum conditions and poor air quality, it was the Garden City Movement that the city’s municipal authorities looked to when planning new housing estates on land to the south of the city centre in the interwar years. Subsequently referred to as Wythenshawe Garden Suburb, residents had access to their own private gardens which they were encouraged to look after and cultivate. This chapter looks at the importance of these private gardens to early residents of the estate, and how these once-valued green spaces have fared after almost one hundred years of change.

A mix of direct quotes, imaginative inhabitations and factual content, this piece explores the everyday realities for people living in unsupported temporary accommodation in Manchester. This population of the hidden homeless suffer from poor conditions, insecure tenancies, and associated mental and physical health problems.

Moors explores the relationship between history, place and the individual. The writer and her friend are looking for the remains of Glodwick Road train station in Oldham, Greater Manchester. The two of them have opposite responses to the environment – one feeling uncomfortable, the other not. The writer considers the location’s long history of extreme violence – which includes the Moors murders, a mysterious suicide and the 2001 Oldham riots – and if it might have influenced her friend’s impressions.

‘Loop lines’ are cycle ways and footpaths created on former railway lines which were closed following the infamous Beeching Report of 1963. In Greater Manchester, a number of loop lines provide miles of traffic-free routes for urban cyclists. The best-known, the well-used Fallowfield Loop, offers a commuter route between south and east Manchester. Others include the Roe Green Loop Line, in suburban Salford, and the Middlewood Way, which runs into rural Cheshire from the outskirts of Stockport. As well as providing off-road routes and acting as green spaces, this chapter argues that they provide important spaces for learning, sharing and socialising.

Does the city have a genius loci? What does it mean when we talk about Manchester’s spirit? Is the city losing its soul? A personal exploration of what ‘Manchester’ means and how its essence can be defined. The search takes us from scraps of green space to a suburban kitchen table via the Northern Quarter and the multiple meanings of the Manchester bee.

Museum reflects on the role of Manchester Museum in broader debates about decolonisation, focused particularly on the large Egyptian collection and recent moves to recognise the colonial dimensions of British museums and the difficult conversations that lie ahead.

Laundrettes as islands of communalism and bulwarks of social identity and community formation, set against the increasing anomie of neoliberal societies. The decline and fall of laundrettes. Semiotics of archaic machine instruction and public behaviour rules signage within laundrettes. The affective history of laundrettes in inner-city Manchester as narrated in a mytho-autobiographical form. Navigation of intimacy within the public space of the laundrette, including practices around loading and unloading underwear and other intimate and private-facing textiles. Hierarchies of power and knowledge within laundrettes and their effect on customer efficiency. The structure of multilingual conversations in urban laundrettes.

Homeless gives the lie to the Manchester bee myth – a myth about solidarity and warmth, of togetherness, of a city of benevolent left-wing radicals. Here is Manchester, both old and new, as a radical right city: buy yourself a new shirt, get yourself into the game, or die in a doorway.

Shopping centre focuses on the history of the Arndale, the first of a series of shopping centres, and the largest in Europe when it was first built. The chapter looks at the architecture, its cultural relevance, public and local opinions of the design, and some of the more impactful events in its history – such as the 1996 IRA bombing.

From Russia to Manchester; textile samplers as archives. Cottonopolis rethought. Thread can repair, connect and seal our stories of displacement, belonging, migration. We find hints of industry, revolution, movement and displacement in Alice Pitfield’s writings, but they are perhaps best visualised in two textile pieces she produced. Her thread replaces words. The two pieces encapsulate the complexities of a Manchester that it is both domestic and public, international and local, traditional and modern.

Nightwalking enables the city to be redisied, reimagined and reinvented with each step. Away from the busy, commercially driven aspects of nightlife it is possible to experience a different side of the city: the secret, the hidden, and the unknown. The city at night can be contemplative, fascinating, eerie and enchanting. For in the nocturnal hours urban places feel somehow less fixed and have an otherworldliness that is palpable. This chapter describes nightwalking as a way to engage with darkness and the city, the different atmospheres and ambiances. These multisensory experiences allow us to encounter places very differently. There are numerous and wonderful rewards for doing so.

Brick takes the reader through the chequered history of a former brickworks in east Manchester. After a brief period of production, the site has become a derelict wasteland attracting antisocial and criminal behaviour, including a notorious local murderer. In spite of this, nature has reclaimed the place as its own, and it is argued that this return to nature is a fitting end state, rather than further exploitation by property developers.

This chapter considers the legacy of nuclear medicine in Manchester, from its origins to the present day. The Cancer Pavilion and Home for Incurables was founded in the city in 1892. As attitudes towards cancer changed, ‘Incurables’ was dropped from its title. By 1901, the Cancer Pavilion had a thirty-bed capacity and became the Christie Hospital. At the Christie, a form of electromagnetic radiation known as Roentgen waves had come into use as an ‘X-ray treatment’ for cancerous growths. Professor Robert Briggs Wild, a pioneer of X-ray treatment in Manchester, became interested in the benefits of a newly disied element called radium-226. This element had been identified by the Curies in 1898, and then isolated for use by 1902. While the first nuclear medicine treatments have now become redundant, the Christie remains one of Europe’s most important hospitals for nuclear medicine innovation.