This chapter argues that taste needs to be thought of as a mix of period styles, social differences, and personal preferences and judgements. Starting with the work of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, the chapter argues that Hume recognised the way that sentiment is an important aspect of taste to be found alongside but sometimes in conflict with judgement. To negotiate this conflict Hume promoted the role of critics as arbiters of taste. The chapter argues that while Hume was writing at a very early stage of consumerism his arguments have guided how taste has operated in the postwar period, except that the role of tastemakers has been considerably enlarged. The chapter ends by looking at Jenny Diski’s memoir of the 1960s and its description of the role of consumption in producing a complex sense of being modern.

This chapter looks at the key role of popular sociology in the 1960s and 1970s and how important this was for consolidating the connections between taste and class, and for generating a self-consciousness about this connection. This popular sociology was at the forefront of trying to map a new world of class that was emerging at a time of postwar affluence, relatively high wages for manual workers, and new educational opportunities. The new universities that were built in the 1960s were part of this changing world of taste and class and were often the most enthusiastic institutions in embracing sociology. Magazines such as New Society were crucial in popularising the social sciences. The chapter ends by looking at how social scientists were satirised within popular culture and how the satire was often aimed at the tastes that they embodied.

Public transport, threat and conviviality in twenty-first century nocturnal Manchester. Night workers and leisure industry consumers converge in post-midnight public spaces. Costs and externalities in public transport microeconomic price mechanisms. Navigating public space during times of high delinquency and intoxication: the role of the citizen and the security apparatus of the state. Interpersonal negotiation at municipal transport nodes; night-time religious offerings and profanities witnessed at late-night bus stops. A participant-observer’s insight. Civic society and contrasting understandings of personal space and private–public boundaries of intimacy-showing in racialised societies after midnight in urban public spaces.

This section begins with a discussion of the principal objectives and concepts underpinning the study, and well as the intellectual and historiographic context within which the study is situated. Here the notion of ‘inner empire’ is both explained and justified as a scholarly framework. It then proceeds to an overview of scholarship to date, highlighting key moments in the development of the field. Finally, it outlines the content of the book, chapter by chapter.

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.

This chapter looks at how the tastes exemplified by Habitat and The House Book coincided with a rise in homeownership and how this was related to the emergence of gentrification in many large cities. The taste for Victoriana and for rustic life fashioned a new enthusiasm for older properties that had previously been considered undesirable. While today gentrification is often considered to be the largescale encroachment of middle-class homeowners into previously working-class areas, the chapter argues that it is also a sign of more complex and confusing aspects of class realignment. The chapter also considers the way that urban areas took on some of the characteristics of a more rural way of living and how a fashion for Scandinavian architecture was symptomatic of the way that modern design was used to promote the home as a place of leisure and informality.

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.