This chapter draws on a visit to a large, sprawling industrial ruin, subsequently demolished. It details the wealthy industrialist who founded the factory, and its evolution as a large production facility for chain making. The discussion draws a contrast between the formerly busy production line and the quiet dereliction of its ruinous state. Description is supplemented by an incident in which fear surged, later to be dispelled, and by an account of some of the enigmatic vestiges that remained. The chapter concludes by contextualising this ruin as part of an economic process of producing abundant ruins across Greater Manchester, and their subsequent erasure and replacement in recent years.

Architecture is understood to be meaningful beyond mere structure. It is argued that a building conveys a host of different meanings as it evolves, from conception to construction, occupation and reception. Multiple understandings across different contexts, from the architect responsible, the client, the building’s occupants, and its reception by contemporaries and subsequent critics, provide evidence about it in terms of its immediate environment, wider culture, and historic context. Australia House is the first of London’s Dominion Houses, constructed by the British empire’s self-governing Dominions between 1913 and 1959 in an imperial precinct encircling Trafalgar Square. Australia House gave impetus to the idea of an imperial precinct and to a style of building that expressed an imperial presence and added to London’s architectural vocabulary. This chapter will show how new insights on the phenomenon of empire can be gained, explored, and explained through consideration of architecture that sprang from the imperial experience. It will do so by showing how Australia House is a manifestation and an enduring example of the impact of the wider British empire on the built environment of modern Britain. It will show how the complex history of empire within Britain can be read through its architecture.

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.

The discussion of race and ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s was usually seen as a social issue quite distinct from questions about class. This chapter works to connect them. It does this partly by looking at the slow emergence of a Black and Asian middle class in Britain. Downward class mobility was often an accompaniment to migrating to Britain from former commonwealth countries and, alongside structural racism, made it hard for many Black and Asian Britons to attain the lifestyles that their white counterparts achieved. The chapter looks at Michael McMillan’s The West Indian Front Room – a recreation of a generalised Caribbean-British front room from the 1960s and 1970s – and following McMillan (as well as Stuart Hall and others) shows its connection to an older sense of ‘respectability’ that could be found in ideas of the parlour in the Caribbean and in Britain. The chapter concludes by looking at the magazine Root – a style magazine aimed at the Black British experience and promoting a lifestyle similar to the ‘controlled casualness’ that existed in other lifestyle magazines.

The introduction establishes some of the main elements of the book, through personal reminiscences about growing up in a new housing development in a village in Essex and as a paperboy noting the growing size of the weekend newspapers and monthly magazines. The introduction goes on to explain its main claim about the role of taste in generating new feelings about class. To pursue this, it explains how the book understands the idea of class and taste, and how the rise of popular sociology was important for the way that taste was experienced in the postwar period.

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.