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.

This chapter investigates Manchester City Football Club’s now demolished former stadium, Maine Road, Moss Side. A discussion of the economic and social processes that influenced the club’s relocation to the City of Manchester Stadium in 2003, part of the broader transformation of Britain’s sporting landscape, is followed by a description of the stadium and its surroundings. The densely packed terraced housing, the numerous eateries and pubs and manifold modes of access, made this a richly atmospheric, sensual setting on match days, saturated with numerous social activities. The second part of the chapter focuses on the residues of this stadium that remain: sites of naming and commemoration, and the material and topographical traces.

Manchester is not a city readily associated with green space. Yet, in order to alleviate inner-city slum conditions and poor air quality, it was the Garden City Movement that the city’s municipal authorities looked to when planning new housing estates on land to the south of the city centre in the interwar years. Subsequently referred to as Wythenshawe Garden Suburb, residents had access to their own private gardens which they were encouraged to look after and cultivate. This chapter looks at the importance of these private gardens to early residents of the estate, and how these once-valued green spaces have fared after almost one hundred years of change.

A mix of direct quotes, imaginative inhabitations and factual content, this piece explores the everyday realities for people living in unsupported temporary accommodation in Manchester. This population of the hidden homeless suffer from poor conditions, insecure tenancies, and associated mental and physical health problems.

Moors explores the relationship between history, place and the individual. The writer and her friend are looking for the remains of Glodwick Road train station in Oldham, Greater Manchester. The two of them have opposite responses to the environment – one feeling uncomfortable, the other not. The writer considers the location’s long history of extreme violence – which includes the Moors murders, a mysterious suicide and the 2001 Oldham riots – and if it might have influenced her friend’s impressions.

‘Loop lines’ are cycle ways and footpaths created on former railway lines which were closed following the infamous Beeching Report of 1963. In Greater Manchester, a number of loop lines provide miles of traffic-free routes for urban cyclists. The best-known, the well-used Fallowfield Loop, offers a commuter route between south and east Manchester. Others include the Roe Green Loop Line, in suburban Salford, and the Middlewood Way, which runs into rural Cheshire from the outskirts of Stockport. As well as providing off-road routes and acting as green spaces, this chapter argues that they provide important spaces for learning, sharing and socialising.

Does the city have a genius loci? What does it mean when we talk about Manchester’s spirit? Is the city losing its soul? A personal exploration of what ‘Manchester’ means and how its essence can be defined. The search takes us from scraps of green space to a suburban kitchen table via the Northern Quarter and the multiple meanings of the Manchester bee.

Museum reflects on the role of Manchester Museum in broader debates about decolonisation, focused particularly on the large Egyptian collection and recent moves to recognise the colonial dimensions of British museums and the difficult conversations that lie ahead.

Laundrettes as islands of communalism and bulwarks of social identity and community formation, set against the increasing anomie of neoliberal societies. The decline and fall of laundrettes. Semiotics of archaic machine instruction and public behaviour rules signage within laundrettes. The affective history of laundrettes in inner-city Manchester as narrated in a mytho-autobiographical form. Navigation of intimacy within the public space of the laundrette, including practices around loading and unloading underwear and other intimate and private-facing textiles. Hierarchies of power and knowledge within laundrettes and their effect on customer efficiency. The structure of multilingual conversations in urban laundrettes.