This book is concerned with the remarkable changes made to the built environment in Lancashire’s main textile district – essentially the eastern and central parts of the county – during the Industrial Revolution (c1780-c1850). A case-study approach is taken, with findings from investigations at six different types of site being presented. The sites included are water-powered mill remains in the Cheesden Valley, near Rochdale; Barrow Bridge factory village, near Bolton; the former handloom weavers’ colony at Club Houses, Horwich; Preston’s Winckley Square; Eanam Wharf at Blackburn; and, to the north of Bolton, the road between Bromley Cross and Edgworth. The case studies show how, in rural and urban areas alike, developments in industry, housing and transport greatly extended the built environment and brought striking new features to it. Emphasis is placed on interpreting the physical evidence the sites provide, linking it with that taken from various types of documentary source, especially historical maps. By making comparisons with developments occurring at similar types of site elsewhere in Britain, as well as in Europe and North America, the forms the changes took are explained and their significance assessed. Additionally, insights are provided into the economic and social impact the changes brought, especially on the everyday lives that people led.

The great industrial cities of Manchester and Liverpool dominate the southern band of Lancashire. Manchester's buildings range from its little-known medieval cathedral, housing some of the finest medieval wood carving in England, to imposing factories and civic and commercial monuments, among which Waterhouse's great Gothic Town Hall is the supreme example. Liverpool's two famous twentieth-century cathedrals watch over a no less proud city, whose distinctive mixture of toughness and display appear variously at the early Victorian Albert Dock, its sumptuous contemporary St George's Hall, and the great commercial parade alongside the Mersey. Towns such as Bury and Rochdale, showing the same civic endeavour on a smaller scale, stud a landscape that rises into dramatic moorland country to the east.

In this innovative contribution to the field of environmental history, Stephen Mosley explores the devastating human and environmental costs of smoke pollution in the world’s first industrial city.

Includes entries for maps and atlases.

“The British coast is where journeys begin and where journeys end, where sun rises and where sun sets.” In John Chatterton’s A Walk by the Sea, John tells the story of his journey from Land’s End to circumnavigate an island with a longer coastline than France or India with an infinite variety of landscapes, seascapes and cultures. After having always wanted to walk the coastline of Great Britain and returning to normality after the foot and mouth epidemic was declared over in 2001, John started his epic journey around Great Britain. He quickly realised that this was not just a walk, and this book is certainly not a walker’s handy guidebook to the periphery of Blake’s ‘green and pleasant land,’ but something much deeper and meaningful. For John, walking gets the most out of travel, but this was a ‘journey’ not a walk. The journey is a reflection of Britain in the first millennium of the 21st century - its events its places and its people. Walking, unlike other forms of travel, allows time for expansion of thoughts and ideas, and reflections on life and times. This journey uses Britain as a backdrop to explore philosophical, social, political, geographical and cultural issues that spring to mind on the way. Although these thoughts and ideas are physically separate from the journey, John explains how they are also a deeply intrinsic part of it too. “A Walk by the Sea is much more than a usual guidebook but, instead, is a psycho-geographical journey around the Great British coastline in thefirst decade of the new millennium,” comments John.