In 2012 the students of Quebec went on strike for several months. The street protests of the Maple Spring are described in terms of Lettrist and Situationist theories of psychogeography, the dérive, and broader critical frameworks. Insofar as the revolt of the masses is typically appropriated by dominant forces, emancipatory movements are caught between civil society and the coercive machinery of the state. The seeds of such radical collective organisation were evident in the Maple Spring where the combative syndicalism of the student groups allowed for the combination of both political programme and democratic radicalisation over an extended period of time.

The fact that ancient masonry structures are still standing testifies to the engineering skills of their builders. Gothic vaults represent such builders’ peak achievements, so this book approaches the principles underlying the longevity of masonry structures by applying structural analysis to Gothic architecture. Of the three main structural criteria of strength, stiffness and stability, only the last is usually critical for masonry structures. The semicircular arch shows the importance for stability of correct proportions: as realised by Hooke, and later exploited by Poleni and others, to be stable, an arch must contain its line of thrust, which follows a catenary (the shape of a hanging chain, inverted). Advances in the theory also came from, among others, Galileo (on strength) and Navier (on stability, with an emphasis on solving equations with boundary conditions). The examples of three- and four-legged tables show that small changes in boundary conditions of structures can lead to large changes in the positions of thrust lines. The theory abandons the quest to know the ‘actual’ state of a structure, instead examining (and avoiding) possible modes of collapse.

Cotton explores the textile history of Manchester by looking at its evolution from a large town into a major commercial city. Despite being a hub for cotton in the nineteenth century, cotton does not grow in Manchester, and so the city grew into a globalised centre of trade. The chapter touches on the little-known history of slavery that grew with the city, while demonstrating how the textile industry continued to evolve into the more recent past.

The human sense of touch allows us to understand the world through texture and shape and enables the manipulation and embodiment of tools. Neurophysiological and psychophysical research has identified the exquisitely sensitive neural and psychological mechanisms that capture information through the skin. Ecologically, this information is used to guide behaviour and control movement. However, as Manchester thrums at our fingertips, these capabilities are hijacked by the motion of the city. Through vibrotactile psychogeography, this chapter explores the interface between the vibration of transport, construction and material texture, and the physiological machinery of sensation.

The M60, Manchester’s outer ring road, is a thing of wonder: thirty-six miles that form the UK’s only circular motorway which, were it not for its twenty-seven junctions, could be an infinite loop of Ballardian lust for drivers. The sheer scale and height of the ring road at the Barton High Level Bridge is nothing short of spectacular as its sleek concrete curves take you into the sky. Stretching out at either end of this motorway section is the ceaseless thrum of traffic, audible to many within its circumference and beyond, reminding Mancunians that their circulation system is very much alive.

A narrative connecting archives of mothers, daughters and a Russian childhood. The story of Alice Pitfield, encountered through a curl of her hair and a plait cut from her mother’s, found in the Royal Northern College of Music archives; building a new archive of hair-stories: images and narratives from women in Manchester Art Gallery in 2016. Alice’s curl and her mother’s plait, alongside the hair-stories of other women, offer us a different type of Manchester. Manchester-as-woman, mother, sister. Manchester as playful, tender, corporeal and vulnerable.

Here, immigration is discussed and the negative connotations of the word are drawn into question by dismissing its use as a political weapon to win votes or cause dissent. The chapter examines attitudes to media iage of immigrants and refugees, and questions what it means to be English.

This final chapter uses the Adrian Mole books to chart a route from the 1970s to the present in terms of class and taste. The fictional character of Adrian Mole believes in the taste of ‘controlled casualness’ and all that goes with it. He also never quite attains it for all sorts of reasons. The promise of classlessness, even as a feeling, is as much a problem as a solution. The chapter goes on to explore claims made about the duvet being a cause of national decline and the claims about the end of class society made by John Prescott and John Major. It ends with the question of how climate change and increased social divisions will affect the relationships of class and taste.

This chapter explores the history of Strangeways Prison in Manchester, the writer’s fascination with the place, and how that fascination might be problematic. The writer’s interest stems from her research into her distant ancestor, Mary Ann Britland, a serial poisoner who became the first woman hanged at the prison. The chapter discusses Strangeways’ iconic panopticon design, the 1990 Strangeways riot, and how the violence of that event is still visible in the prison’s external walls. It concludes by calling on researchers and writers to remember the current significance of the places their research takes them and the people living today who might be affected by their work.

To accompany the first Imperial Forestry Conference in London, the recently formed Department of Overseas Trade organised an exhibition of empire timber in 1920. Its object was to bring ‘into more universal use the numerous though little known timbers of Empire’. This new emphasis reflected a postwar commitment to fostering greater trade and cooperation with colonies and dominions rich in forestry resources. From the late 1920s, the Empire Marketing Board took a more active role in promoting empire timbers, hosting a permanent display at the newly established Building Centre in New Bond Street (1932). At the Royal Institute of British Architect’s new headquarters at 66 Portland Place (1934), empire timbers were used extensively for furnishing and ornament, especially those from the Dominions and India, representing the profession as an imperial interconnected confraternity of practitioners. At the Imperial Forestry Institute in Oxford, Hubert Worthington’s building, designed in 1939 but not opened until 1951, was replete with samples of empire timber, ‘donated’ by colonial forestry associations in a context of timber supply shortage after the war. These interconnected exhibitions and projects highlight how the architectural profession conceived of its role in a global imperial supply chain. This chapter discusses not only these events and places, but also how the architectural ‘shoppers’ of empire timber promoted the craft processes needed to work these materials, demonstrating how the empire timber campaign was a tenet of a longer discourse on design reform in early twentieth-century Britain.

This chapter explores how Manchester has been continuously recomposed from distinctive forms of stone, brought from elsewhere to reproduce the city. The discussion identifies the local medieval quarry that supplied stone to the city’s grandest structures before explaining how the development of canals and railways made available much better, more varied stone supplies from the North and Midlands, transforming Manchester’s built environment. Key quarries are identified as well as notable buildings that exemplify particular stone use. The conclusion highlights how, contemporaneously, most stone is imported in the form of thin veneers from various foreign sources, and that concrete, which includes stone, has replaced stone as the dominant building material.

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.