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.

Continuing with the theme of satirising social scientists, this chapter begins with J. B. Priestley’s novel The Image Men to explore the phenomena of associating taste primarily with status seeking and status anxiety. It goes on to show that status anxiety was often the preeminent way that popular sociology was trying to understand modern consumer society and to changes in the experience of class. The image of the aspirational and anxious new middle classes is at the heart of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party. A more generous representation of changing class experiences and the tastes that go with them is provided by the comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? In both examples it is women who are seen as being the most susceptible to consumerism. The chapter finishes by looking at the phenomenon of the TV chef by focusing on Delia Smith and Keith Floyd.

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.

This chapter explores the way that railway arches have traditionally been perceived and represented as commonplace elements of the British urban built environment, and how the post-industrial transformation of Manchester can be read through the gradual changes of use occurring within these spaces. The arches, long associated with working-class industrial labour, criminality, and spatial marginality, have gradually been transformed from light industrial commercial units to spaces of leisure and consumption, such as cafe-bars and microbreweries. Since the 1980s, and especially since the sale of the publicly owned railway property estate, the arches have been central to property-led development and commercial gentrification in Manchester and beyond.

Flower looks at the role fauna plays in Manchester. From the beauty of hand-picked flowers to the mosaic memorials on the pavements by the Town Hall, this chapter studies the symbolism and history of these flowers and the importance their role plays in defining the city. It gives a quick overview of the Peterloo massacre by comparing those injured and killed by the dragoons to flowers that had been trampled on.

Social class, the left-behind, migration and the history of underclass occupations as exemplified by the demographics, including ethnicity, of car wash attendants. Mobilities, the cocooning effect of the car cockpit and the discombobulation of temporarily evacuated drivers bringing their car for valeting at car wash enterprises. Employment structures and practices of car washes and the economics of the geographical distribution of car wash enterprises within urban landscapes. Semaphore, sign and cross-languaging in bottom-rung car wash businesses. Aspiration, rags-to-riches myths and film fantasies connecting British car wash work with the American Dream. The interrelated economic histories of car wash employment and taxi driving.

Numerous cobbles, or setts, burst through the asphalt-ied streets of Manchester. Of Roman and medieval origin, they were produced in their millions in the nineteenth century. The discussion turns to their material construction, and to their origins in nearby quarries, including mention of some rare wooden setts and the divergent patterns in which they were laid down across the city. The vanished world signified by cobbles is conjured: the workers who laid them, and the horses that once proliferated, with numerous stables, the smell of horse manure and the sounds of hooves on cobbles. The chapter concludes by underpinning how cobbles continue to feature in cultural representations of Manchester and the industrial North

This chapter explores public statuary in Greater Manchester, highlighting changing ideas about the types of figures who should be commemorated and the forms this might take. Starting with traditional statues of royalty and political grandees, it then explores attempts to make statues more relatable and relevant. These include crowdfunded statues of popular entertainment figures (including the comedians Frank Sidebottom and Victoria Wood) and a new statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, which was chosen following a public vote. It highlights work by artists and activists to address the historic gender imbalance in those the city has chosen to commemorate.

The chapter begins with Juliet Gardiner’s memoir of married life in a Span house and how the various homeowners in the estate all decorated in the same way, bringing together a loose mid-century modern style with bits of Victoriana. It continues by examining Terence Conran’s The House Book, as a guide to eclectic interior design and its emphasis on junk shop ‘finds’. The chapter then looks at examples of informal lifestyle culture in cooking and food (for example the growing popularity of mayonnaise, and the emergence of PizzaExpress) and how the clothing shop Biba developed into a ‘must have’ look for young women. The range of what might constitute the ‘good life’ ends up by looking at the Mirror Dinghy and the attempt to make sailing a leisure pursuit affordable to all.

By looking at two sites close to Manchester city centre – Ordsall Riverside and Middlewood Locks – this chapter highlights the interwoven spatiotemporal stories that shape the modern city. Commenting on both the volatile, often conflicting timescales of contemporary capitalism and the modest everyday cadences that influence urban space, this piece highlights that the city is, in fact, a site of constant flux.

This chapter tells the story of how Terence Conran’s Habitat shops promoted a range of goods that were eclectic in style but were all part of a taste for informal living and often included rustic furnishings and utensils. Starting in 1964 Habitat quickly moved from being a boutique furnishing shop to being a mainstay of the British high street, taking a role equivalent in furniture and domestic goods to that represented by Sainsbury’s in groceries. The chapter looks at the importance of the merger with Lupton Morton and the use of catalogues to promote a lifestyle of Habitat living. The chapter details the kinds of displays that the shop became famous for and how Terence Conran described the role of the shop in promoting what he called ‘solid citizen’ furniture. The chapter ends by looking at the way the novelist Angela Carter described the shop in New Society.