An enlightening and entertaining portrait of the English city’s history, legends, and lore, including photos and quotations: “Excellent.” —NB Magazine This is not a chronological history of Manchester filled with names and dates and figures. Rather, it is an eclectic mix of fact, fiction, legend, and myth that presents the history of Manchester from its beginnings as a Roman settlement, then as an insignificant market town, to its place as a city at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and beyond—capturing not only the often tragic lives, times, struggles, and beliefs of the city’s ever-expanding population, but also its resilience and humor. Including photographs, illustrations, poems and quotes, the book ranges from the funny, including the stories of “Spanking Roger” and the “Manchester Mummy” to the tragic stories of “Cholera” and “Mary Bradley”, together with the bizarre “Pig Tales” and the criminal “Scuttlers” and “Purrers.” For anyone interested in urban, social, or English history, this is a well-researched, well-written, and, most importantly, entertaining and informative read.

This work offers an examination of Manchester's architecture, from its origins to the present-day rebuilding of the city centre. It follows Manchester's growth from a village to what many see as England's second city.

Victorian City is a study of the social and intellectual attitudes of Victorian society to the challenge of urbanization.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book provides a comprehensive over view of eighteenth-century British medical reform, but as an economic historian, Buer considered the effect of diseases and medical intervention on population growth, not on medical ideas. Other optimistic views of the century either focused, like Buer, on the 'standard of living debate' or a related debate about the role (if any) of hospitals and public health measures in reducing mortality during the industrial revolution, giving only pasing attention to disease theory.