At the end of the 1970s, Manchester seemed to be sliding into the dustbin of history. Today the city is an international destination for culture and sport, and one of the fastest-growing urban regions in Europe. This book offers a first-hand account of what happened in between. Arriving in Manchester as a wide-eyed student in 1979, Andy Spinoza went on to establish the arts magazine City Life before working for the Manchester Evening News and creating his own PR firm. In a forty-year career he has encountered a who’s who of Manchester personalities, from cultural icons such as Tony Wilson to Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and influential council leaders Sir Richard Leese and Sir Howard Bernstein. His remarkable account traces Manchester’s gradual emergence from its post-industrial malaise, centring on the legendary nightclub the Haçienda and the cultural renaissance it inspired.

How did Manchester became the poster-child of neoliberal urbanisation, and what can the people that live there do about it? In cities across the world, gentrification and the housing crisis are facts of life. But how did we get to this point? And is there any way we can fight back? A good place to begin answering these questions is Manchester, England. Over the last thirty years, corporate developers, rentier capitalists and boosterist politicians have reshaped Manchester in their image, replacing its working-class communities, public spaces and affordable housing with skyscrapers, luxury developments and a private rental market that creates wealth for rentiers and impoverishes everybody else. The Rentier City traces this story, showing how it fits within the longer history of Manchester. In doing so unveils a larger story of the relationship between capital and our cities, between rentier and rentee, and gives us a blueprint of how fight back against rentier capitalism and take back control of the cities we live in.

A bicentennial celebration of brilliant thinkers from The University of Manchester's history. The year 2024 marks two centuries since the establishment of The University of Manchester in its earliest form. The first of England’s civic universities, Manchester has been home and host to a huge number of influential thinkers and generated world-changing ideas. This book presents a rich account of the remarkable contribution that people associated with The University of Manchester have made to human knowledge. A who’s who of Manchester greats, it presents fascinating snapshots of pioneering artists, scholars and scientists, from the poet and activist Eva Gore-Booth to the economist Arthur Lewis, the computer scientist Alan Turing and the physicist Brian Cox.

Culture is at the heart to what it means to be human. But twenty-five years ago, the British government rebranded art and culture as ‘creative industries’, valued for their economic contribution, and set out to launch the UK as the creative workshop of a globalised world. Where does that leave art and culture now? Facing exhausted workers and a lack of funding and vision, culture finds itself in the grip of accountancy firms, creativity gurus and Ted Talkers. At a time of sweeping geo-political turmoil, culture has been de-politicised, its radical energies reduced to factors of industrial production. This book is about what happens when an essential part of our democratic citizenship, fundamental to our human rights, is reduced to an industry. Culture is not an industry argues that art and culture need to renew their social contract and re-align with the radical agenda for a more equitable future. Bold and uncompromising, the book offers a powerful vision for change.

‘Adolf Island’ offers new forensic, archaeological and spatial perspectives on the Nazi forced and slave labour programme that was initiated on the Channel Island of Alderney during its occupation in the Second World War. Drawing on extensive archival research and the results of the first in-field investigations of the ‘crime scenes’ since 1945, the book identifies and characterises the network of concentration and labour camps, fortifications, burial sites and other material traces connected to the occupation, providing new insights into the identities and experiences of the men and women who lived, worked and died within this landscape. Moving beyond previous studies focused on military aspects of occupation, the book argues that Alderney was intrinsically linked to wider systems of Nazi forced and slave labour.

Concise Polymeric Materials Encyclopedia culls the most used, widely applicable articles from the Polymeric Materials Encyclopedia - more than 1,100 - and presents them to you in a condensed, well-ordered format. Featuring contributions from more than 1,800 scientists from all over the world, the book discusses a vast array of subjects related to the: synthesis, properties, and applications of polymeric materials development of modern catalysts in preparing new or modified polymers modification of existing polymers by chemical and physical processes biologically oriented polymers This comprehensive, easy-to-use resource on modern polymeric materials serves as an invaluable addition to reference collections in the polymer field.

Includes reports of annual conferences held by various trade federations.

Long neglected, the Eighteenth Century is now the focus for much of the most exciting work in history today. This new research has so altered and expanded our understanding of the Georgian economy that some historians now question the very idea of an `Industrial Revolution'. John Rule uses the latest scholarship for a comprehensive and magisterial review -- of population, output, agriculture, manufacture, labour, communications, towns, finance and domestic and overseas markets -- through which he reassesses the `vital century' in which the contours of the modern economy first emerge to view. An analytical survey which offers the first comprehensive economic history of the C.18th.