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By 1801 Manchester held more than seventy thousand people and had no government. It was still administered by a manorial court leet, the machinery of a village, and did not get an elected council until a charter of incorporation in 1838. The first industrial city in the world grew for two generations faster than anyone was empowered to manage it. Nearly everything visitors find remarkable and everything Engels found appalling follows from that gap.
The basin where the Bridgewater Canal terminates, layered with Roman fort remains, canal arms and railway viaducts stacked over each other. The canal opened in 1761 to bring coal in from Worsley and was Britain's first entirely artificial waterway. Standing here you can see three transport revolutions occupying the same few hundred metres.
Part of the Science and Industry Museum, and the terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. It is the oldest surviving passenger railway station in the world. The building looks like a plain Georgian terrace because nobody had yet worked out what a railway station was supposed to look like.
A working library in a fifteenth-century building, in continuous operation since 1653 and the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world. Marx and Engels read together at a window alcove here in the summer of 1845. The desk is still there and you can sit at it.
Alfred Waterhouse's neo-Gothic pile of 1877, built after incorporation finally gave the city a council that needed somewhere to sit. Its scale is a statement of arrival by a place that had spent decades without civic institutions. It is a Victorian building deliberately pretending to be medieval, by a city with almost no medieval past.
A neo-Gothic library of 1900, built by Enriqueta Rylands as a memorial to her husband, a cotton magnate. The reading room looks like a cathedral nave and was wired for electric light from the start, with its own generator. Cotton money paid for it, which is the honest description of most of the grand architecture here.
A tiered monument near the site where cavalry charged a peaceful reform meeting in 1819, killing and injuring many. The demonstrators were demanding parliamentary representation for a city that had none. The memorial is deliberately not a plinth: it was designed to be climbed and spoken from, though accessibility criticism has dogged it since it opened.
A late medieval collegiate church raised to cathedral status only in 1847, when the city's population finally forced the issue. It was badly damaged by bombing in 1940 and again by the IRA bomb in 1996. Look at the misericords, the carved seat undersides in the choir, which are among the finest in the country and survived all of it.
A district of former textile warehouses now full of record shops and bars, and the part of the city most often used as a stand-in for New York in films. The buildings are tall and close and iron-shuttered because they stored cotton, not because anyone was designing a neighbourhood.
The far end of the canal, where the water runs a startling orange from iron leaching out of the old mine workings. The Duke of Bridgewater built the canal to get his coal to Manchester and halved the price of it in the process. The colour is the mine still bleeding into the system two centuries on.
The first industrial city in the world was run like a village until 1838.
Manchester passed seventy thousand people by 1801 while still being administered by a manorial court leet. It received no charter of incorporation, and therefore no elected council, until 1838. The governance gap is why conditions got as bad as they did.
The oldest surviving passenger railway station looks like a house.
Liverpool Road opened in 1830 as the Manchester end of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and still stands. It resembles a Georgian terrace because the architectural language of the railway station had not been invented yet.
Marx and Engels shared a desk in Manchester and it is still there.
Chetham's Library has operated continuously since 1653 and is the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world. The two men worked together at a window alcove in 1845, and visitors can sit in the same spot.
Britain's first fully artificial canal was built to move one man's coal.
The Bridgewater Canal opened in 1761 to carry coal from the Duke of Bridgewater's mines at Worsley into central Manchester. It was extended to the Mersey by 1776 and set off the canal-building boom that fed the industrial expansion.
Cavalry charged a crowd demanding the right to vote, in a city with no MP.
The Peterloo massacre of 1819 saw mounted troops ride into a peaceful mass meeting for parliamentary reform. Manchester, then one of the largest towns in the country, had no representation in Parliament at all.
A canal in Greater Manchester runs orange.
At Worsley the Bridgewater Canal is stained a vivid ochre by iron oxide leaching out of the abandoned mine workings the canal was built to serve. The industry closed; the drainage did not.
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