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.

This chapter reflects on the hidden spaces of the city, using alleyways between terraced housing as its focus. It outlines the development of alleyways in the city’s history, as well as exploring their varied use and more recent near disappearance. It also examines how these spaces have been represented, particularly in the photographs of Shirley Baker and in official documentation by the city council. It asks about their future – how their contradictory identity might be valued rather than problematised.

This chapter chronicles the transformation of the Castlefield district—the ‘Stonehenge of railway history’ – and the centrality of transport infrastructure in driving the Industrial Revolution in Manchester. It then looks at contemporary debates around the treatment of railway structures in the city as heritage and how this impacts contemporary efforts to further expand Manchester’s railway network. It highlights the public controversy surrounding the construction of the Ordsall Chord – a new railway link passing through Castlefield – and the unprecedented debate that emerged around the required destruction of railway heritage under the proposed route of the Chord.

Clustered in court housing and cellar dwellings down near the waterfront, the ever-increasing numbers of ‘low Irish’ in Liverpool were viewed with disdain and alarm, embodying the pathologies of violence, unreason, and contagion that obsessed early Victorians. Even before the famine influx of the 1840s, there were calls for drastic interventionist social engineering, justified through ethnic denigration of the Irish ‘other’, a ‘contaminating’ presence within the unreformed and unprotected ‘social body’. Pioneer public health initiatives, followed by compulsory demolition and displacement, soon added to social tensions as Irish nationalist politicians, a growing force in the north end, came to condemn the actions of the Insanitary Property Committee as a form of political gerrymandering. When the Committee was replaced by the Housing Committee, Irish councillors led the way in promoting community-based housing provision, insisting on rehousing within demolition areas and advocating alternatives to ‘workhouse-like’ tenement blocks. Thanks to their input, Liverpool became ‘a mecca for housing experts’ by the beginning of the twentieth century. Harford, the Irish leader, proudly noted that ‘no city in Europe had gone so far as Liverpool in the practical direction of “housing the poorest poor”’.

Manchester has been an important centre of textile production since the Tudor period and, despite the destruction that came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, has retained some of its most significant buildings from this era. Exploring a variety of structures – from grand halls to more modest houses – this chapter highlights this important aspect of the heritage of the urban region. It also questions why so many Tudor buildings have been neglected and left to ruin, asking if more attention should be paid to preserving them.

A creative reflection on Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor, weaving the author’s personal relationship with the road into the space’s fabric and everyday life.

Although public bathing in Britain has a lengthy history, successive Acts of Parliament during the nineteenth century saw the activity become more widespread, with the emphasis in industrialised urban centres, such as Manchester, on public hygiene rather than leisure. However, with improved sanitary conditions at home and the advent of modern domestic appliances, the twentieth century saw a return to public bathing for pure leisure. In the post-1945 period, numerous dedicated swimming pools were opened by municipal authorities across Manchester in places such as Oldham and Radcliffe. Now facing closure and demolition, this chapter offers a lament on the loss of municipal swimming baths and the familiar leisure experience they once offered.

Dye explores the production of blue pigment in east Manchester as a by-product of the area’s iconic gasworks. The Hardman & Holden dye factory’s colourful history of accidents, poisonings, sludges and blue pigeons is investigated through corporate and newspaper archives. Physical traces of the factory have been reduced to blue stains on the perimeter walls; inside lies a wasteland and the unfulfilled promise of a cleaner future.

This chapter focuses on the importance of the chimney in the history of both Manchester and the world. It shows how the chimney shaped the topography of the industrial city and its role in the global transformations generated through cotton capitalism and later climate change.

Edges take all forms: from officially designated boundaries to informally appropriated demarcations; from the sharp lines of man-made routes to the fuzzy outlines of natural features and reclaimed landscapes. The edges explored in this chapter are those where the suburbs are disrupted by the River Mersey, which flows along the southern rim of the city. It is undeniably an edge, only to be crossed via bridges. It is also the connecting thread that weaves together woodlands, meadows, artificial lakes, flooded gravel pits, and so much more. No mere frozen lines on a map: edges are dynamic forcefields for the identity of place and its people.

Cockroft and Rutherford: the atom-splitters. The popular story that the atom was split in Manchester is not quite true – but it is true that much research leading to its possibility was made here. ‘Rutherford’s room’ in Manchester University was investigated as it was found that radioactivity stemming from it was having harmful effects. The chapter explores the mythical power of the word ‘atom’ in terms of Manchester’s inarguable contributions to a new scientific Enlightenment, but does so dialectically, using the word ‘atomised’ to refer to the ways in which the new science, once instrumentalised, turned people and communities into particles.

This short chapter considers the historical connections between Manchester’s Jewish community, its presence in the built environment, and an urban history of anti-Semitism and violence in the city, highlighting how the synagogue acts as a space of memory for these longer histories, both near and far.

The modern-day co-operative movement was founded by a group of workers as a grocery shop in Toad Lane, Rochdale in 1844. This led to the formation of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS), forerunner of today’s Co-operative Group, which is still trading from its headquarters in Manchester. This chapter explores the growth and development of the movement through Manchester’s Co-operative Quarter, showing how the organisation commissioned new buildings as it expanded, and embraced new architectural styles – from art deco to international-style modernism. Now rebranded as a retail and leisure district known as NOMA, many of these landmark buildings are finding new uses.

This chapter will tackle the contested nature of the ‘colonial’ built environment in nineteenth-century Ireland, building on the work of Edward McParland, Alistair Rowan, Lindsey Proudfoot, Alex Bremner, and others. It comprises two parts: the first is an analysis of the processes of production of ‘state’ architecture, with a focus on the network of courthouses, prisons, asylums, and workhouses erected in the early nineteenth century. The study will be based around the Irish grand jury system of local administration and a small number of specific case studies. The colonial question is framed through a Four Nations approach and focuses on the tensions and conflicts within and between Westminster, Dublin Castle, and Irish local government. The second part considers the legacy of this built environment in the early twentieth century; how political events shaped representations of these buildings; and how processes of destruction and demolition codified interpretations and meanings of the colonial question. Moving beyond the high-profile destruction of Dublin’s Four Courts and General Post Office during the revolutionary period, this analysis will look at the fate of lesser-known public buildings in provincial towns into the early 1920s.

The streets belong to everyone and walking offers the chance to encounter, explore and engage with Manchester in a multisensory way. However, many personal, cultural and material factors can limit an individual’s capacity to walk in the city, and this chapter discusses the authors experiences of harassment and everyday sexism. It focuses on gender, while noting intersectionality and the need to take a holistic approach to access.

The common denominator, humanising and social unifying factor of sewers; their parallel and orthogonal positioning with other subterranean, municipal essential services in cities. The phantasmagorical and Gothic elements of urban sewers’ mythos. Sewers as symbols of triumphant Victorian engineering, particularly as celebrated, Herculean red-brick structures memorialising the triumph of scientific progress and Western civilisation. Sewers as the metaphoric scatological, as representative of the subconscious; sewers as pharmacological cornucopias, and as the symbolic seedbed for narratives of crime, escape and capture; sewers as signifiers of abjection, evacuation and repression.