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.

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.

This chapter starts out by looking at the complexity of how people situate themselves within a stratum of class differences, including the example of a woman who believed that there are 28 class categories. Class studies were a bedrock of popular sociology in the 1960s and 1970s, and much of this focused on working men and women who were unsure about what their class position was in this changing world. While many commentators believed that class was locked into types of employment, one commentator in particular took the feeling of class to be particularly important. The Jamaican-born intellectual Stuart Hall, who had been in Britain since 1951, observed that consumer society brought with it a feeling of classlessness for many. Hall saw the feeling of classlessness to be a symptom of both change and confusion. Hall took seriously the idea that being classless wasn’t an option in class society but that feelings of classlessness were part of the contradictory experience of modern life and something that left-wing politics had to face up to.

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”’.

This chapter looks at the new colour supplements that many newspapers introduced in the 1960s. It shows how the mixture of advertising, social investigation, tourism, and lifestyle reporting produced a genre of magazine that promoted aspects of consumer culture. The supplements borrowed heavily from women’s magazines like Good Housekeeping as well as from photo news magazines such as Picture Post. The chapter also looks at how magazines like Nova and Spare Rib addressed changing attitudes around sexuality, femininity, and race.

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.