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.

Manchester Cathedral has major examples of stained glass from the post-war period, following loss and damage of medieval and later glass, most recently during the Second World War and after the 1996 IRA bomb. Margaret Traherne’s Fire Window memorialises the Manchester Blitz, evoking both fire and the blood of sacrifice. A later scheme by Tony Hollaway fills windows in the west end of the building. This major artistic achievement explores the journey from Creation to Revelation, with reference to the cathedral’s connections and patron saints. These works deserve wider recognition and are major examples of twentieth-century art in the city.

The canal network is central to Manchester’s history and identity. A walk along the towpath offers chance to encounter wildlife and trace the industrial heritage of the city. However, the waterways occupy an ambivalent position in the city’s subconscious and are the site of conflict, contradictions, myths and legends. This chapter offers a glimpse beneath the surface, including a visit to the lost gardens of Pomona, the contested queer space of the Undercroft and a brief guide to the legendary canal monsters of Manchester’s canals.

Is it possible to establish Georgian Dublin as a locus of architectural innovation within newly constituted histories of Britain’s ‘inner empire’? Reflecting on the reduced significance ascribed to eighteenth-century Dublin’s built heritage in modern British architectural histories, this chapter seeks to problematie the received wisdom concerning the intellectual exchange between a supposed centre (Britain) and its periphery (Ireland). Efforts to maintain the centrality of London in histories of British Palladianism have certainly proved problematic, not least when one considers that it failed to produce a significant public architecture; but the principal symptom of this subjective bias has been the deliberate diminishment, or even entire omission, of Irish buildings from its teleological narrative. (Nor has the acknowledgment of the ‘Britishness’ of Irish eighteenth-century architecture, by generations of historians in Ireland, affected an enduring revisionism in British scholarship.) Focusing on the historiographical reception of Dublin’s celebrated parliament house (1729–39), this chapter will consider the myriad problems posed by a building with conflicting national and cultural identities; at once a symbol of an emerging political confidence in Ireland during the early Georgian era, and simultaneously a paradigmatic example of enlightened British architectural tastes in the wake of the Hanoverian Succession.

The (in)famous Scottish China Trade firm of Jardine, Matheson & Co. has gone down in history as one of the leading dealers in narcotics of the nineteenth century. Indeed, James Matheson on his return to Britain in the 1840s was parodied by Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil as ‘one McDruggy, fresh from Canton, with a million of opium in each pocket’. The sojourning type represented by Jardine and Matheson was relatively common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland, with family ties and business networks facilitating a system of patronage and investment that deliberately promoted both Scottish and British imperial interests across the globe. As a result, returnees were often eager to plough their profits into purchasing estates and buildings in Scotland. This re-investment of colonial wealth in land and infrastructure had a marked impact on the Scottish landscape, demonstrating in visually conspicuous ways the wider effects of empire and imperial trade on the metropolitan scene. Although a growing literature on the Indian nabob and West Indian absentee planter has sought to reveal these effects in relation to what can be identified as the ‘imperial landscapes’ of England, very little has been done on the impact of China Trade ‘Taipans’, especially in Scotland. This chapter considers the ways in which the wealth of these returnees impacted the landscapes and buildings of post-Union Scotland, arguing that issues of cultural and familial identity played a discernible role in fashioning a particularly Scottish response to the effects of imperial encounter as represented in architecture and the wider built environment.

How was empire relevant to architecture and space in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century London? Firstly, and most obviously, London was built on the profits of colonial trade and resource exploitation. Much of London’s employment involved either the processing of colonial raw materials or the servicing of the empire, through the supply of goods and services, including the administration of colonial government and the activities of engineers, surveyors, bankers, lawyers, and other professions focused on colonial development. The housing and provisioning of all who were employed in these ways generated multiplier effects for the everyday domestic economy. This chapter will place emphasis on the evidence for empire in London’s residential spaces: in the building of luxurious mansion flats which provided a suitably grand backcloth for some forms of imperial display, but more directly provided London pieds à terre for politicians and members of the professions administering and servicing the empire and for colonial servants returning on furlough or retirement; in the layout of suburbs with street and house names redolent of empire, some architectural types and details (bungalows, Indian-inspired domes, elaborately ornamented verandahs) attributable to colonial experience, and public and private gardens planted with exotic species originating in colonial exploration and trade; and even in slums which accommodated migrants and transients as well as dockworkers and their families. Planning concepts associated with the segregation of different land uses and socioeconomic (and, in practice, ethnic) groups can also be related to segregational practices first employed in Asia and Africa.

This chapter traces Greater Manchester’s long association with media production, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the city was known as the ‘Fleet Street of the North’, to the BBC’s MediaCity development at Salford Quays. As well as discussing the production of national and regional publications in the city, it highlights Manchester’s history of alternative publications, including socialist newspapers such as The Clarion and special-interest publications associated with the co-operative movement. Exploring buildings such as the Daily Express building and the Printworks complex, it shows how former press buildings have been adapted for new purposes ranging from city-centre living to entertainment.

This chapter traces Greater Manchester’s long association with media production, from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the city was known as the ‘Fleet Street of the North’, to the BBC’s MediaCity development at Salford Quays. As well as discussing the production of national and regional publications in the city, it highlights Manchester’s history of alternative publications, including socialist newspapers such as The Clarion and special-interest publications associated with the co-operative movement. Exploring buildings such as the Daily Express building and the Printworks complex, it shows how former press buildings have been adapted for new purposes ranging from city-centre living to entertainment.

This chapter explores the connections between Manchester, Hiroshima and peace through the ginkgo tree. The green spaces of Manchester are the adopted home of a living fossil. The paired lobes of the leaves of Ginkgo biloba are marked by prehistoric striations, unchanged for 270 million years. Like Homo sapiens, the ginkgo is the sole survivor of a once ample family tree. Unlike us, a single tree can survive for over two thousand years, outliving our regimes and empires. The ginkgo has somehow persisted, seemingly oblivious to the melodramas of both dinosaurs and humans. However, isotopic traces of our human age are sequestered away within the ginkgo’s trunk during each growing season, to be accessed only by the dark art of dendrochronology. Through the growth and planting of the Manchester-Hiroshima ginkgo trees, the histories of two cities have become entangled as peace becomes globalised.

Cloister is a personal meditation on a building that houses a community within a community. Taking a family connection to a convent as a starting point, it looks at the history behind the red brick. In thinking about the real and imagined lives of the order it explores the impact of the nuns on their local community, and the social and political changes affecting the nuns themselves. It wonders about the future of both the order and the building in a changing world. Primarily, it is a rumination on the different ways women move through the world, hidden and otherwise.

Bradford, an area to the east of Manchester’s city centre, has undergone, and continues to undergo, significant change. Once open pasture, industrialisation throughout the nineteenth century saw factories and mills joined by workers’ housing and associated amenities, such as public houses and places of worship. However, with the decline of industry in the twentieth century and the displacement of Bradford’s residents as municipal authorities enacted comprehensive redevelopment schemes in the post-1945 period, many of those amenities became redundant. This chapter considers whether the relocation of Manchester City Football Club from Moss Side to Bradford offers hope that some of the area’s remaining historic buildings can be repurposed.

Manchester mythology posits a city of warm, gritty, authentic and rooted subjects. It projects an image of itself as tough but ‘homely’. Yet the speed at which the city tears down and rebuilds presents an opposite view. Many buildings are entirely destroyed, but the façade – the frontage – is often left standing. These ‘fronts’ are the second Janus face of Manchester myth. They are also ‘fronts’ as in the frontiers of revanchism, as capitalism finds yet another space to cream surplus from – either directly off or to the detriment of – its citizens. Here is the tragic face, the counterpart to the garrulous myth of the swaggering, cheeky Mancunian on the make. Here is the evidence of Manchester as a radical right city.

In this chapter, a multicultural collage of Manchester’s fabric is evoked through its depiction and description of mosques. Some context and history is given to Manchester Central Mosque, while the Muslim community is felt through discussion of prayer, Eid, Nikah ceremonies and Ramadan.

This chapter explores the history of Dukinfield Cemetery in Greater Manchester, and the writer’s personal connection to one of Manchester’s most notorious historical crimes. The writer is looking for the unmarked grave of Thomas and Elizabeth Hannah Britland, the victims of serial poisoner Mary Ann Britland – the first woman hanged at Strangeways Prison and the writer’s distant ancestor. The chapter includes nineteenth-century descriptions of the newly opened cemetery, and reflects on its significance to the community. It ends with a spot of light gravedigging.

Since the industrial period, bees have been an important symbol of Manchester, present in its civic and mercantile iconography. Yet, as this chapter shows, that symbolism shifted in the wake of the terrorist attack on Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017. Since then, bees have become highly visible symbols of solidarity in the face of terror, a way in which citizens of the city have asserted their unity. This chapter uses various images of bees as a way of exploring their enduring popularity as symbols of the city.