Manchester, a predominantly working-class city, has been at the margins of English culture for centuries. Yet the explosion of music and creativity in Manchester can be traced back from Victorian music hall and the jazz age, through to Oasis.

Manchester is one the world's most iconic cities. Not only was it the first industrial city, it can claim to be the first post-industrial city. This book uses historic maps and unpublished and original plans to chart the dramatic growth and transformation of Manchester as it grew rich on its cotton trade from the late 18th century, experienced periods of boom and bust through the Victorian period, and began its post-industrial transformation in the 20th century. The Peterloo Massacre, the Bridgewater Canal, the railway revolution, Trafford Park industrial estate, the Ship Canal, Belle Vue theme park, Wythenshawe garden city, the 1996 IRA bomb, Coronation Street, iconic football stadiums, and MediaCity are just some of the events and places that have put Manchester on the world's perceptual map and are explored through a wealth of published and unpublished maps and plans in this sumptuously illustrated cartographic history.

This is a history of the Armenian community of Manchester

This book looks at how that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church, coped with mass migration from Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book details the great array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the Church with the men and money that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and a common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. It also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. One of the book’s key aims is to show how the colonial Church should be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The colonial Church was an institution that played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and State.

What is Manchester? Moving far from the glitzy shopping districts and architectural showpieces, away from cool city-centre living and modish cultural centres, this book shows us the unheralded, under-appreciated and overlooked parts of Greater Manchester in which the majority of Mancunians live, work and play. It tells the story of the city thematically, using concepts such a ‘material’, ‘atmosphere’, ‘waste’, ‘movement’ and ‘underworld’ to challenge our understanding of the quintessential post-industrial metropolis. Bringing together contributions from twenty-five poets, academics, writers, novelists, historians, architects and artists from across the region alongside a range of captivating photographs, this book explores the history of Manchester through its chimneys, cobblestones, ginnels and graves. This wide-ranging and inclusive approach reveals a host of idiosyncrasies, hidden spaces and stories that have until now been neglected.

While exploring a church that is being razed in a Manchester slum, four English children are drawn into another world where they are compelled to combat the evil power which grips most of the land.

This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.

“A record of how a city of great wealth ignored the desperate poverty at its very heart . . . It is a lesson in the price of capitalism.” —North West Labour History Journal “It is all free fighting here. Even some of the windows do not open, so it is useless to cry for help. Dampness and misery, violence and wrong, have left their handwriting in perfectly legible characters on the walls.” —Manchester Guardian, 1870 Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world’s first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs. Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of “scuttlers” stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tipped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from a filthy and frightening world. In this shocking book, journalist Dean Kirby takes readers on a hair-raising journey through the gin palaces, alleyways and underground vaults of this nineteenth-century Manchester slum considered so diabolical it was re-christened “hell upon earth” by Friedrich Engels. ENTER ANGEL MEADOW IF YOU DARE . . . “In this book the author expertly achieves driving home the grim horror that was Angel Meadow. These were conditions at the bottom of human endurance and conditions that go beyond imaginations of modern-day citizens.” —Crime Traveller

This book focuses on men's bodies, emotions and material culture to offer a new understanding of masculinities in Britain in the long nineteenth century. Using objects as well as texts and images, it shows how idealised and ugly bodies, and the feelings they stimulated, helped convey ideas about manliness and unmanliness across society.

Shortlisted for Cricket Book of the Year at the British Sports Book Awards Graeme Swann leads us on a compelling adventure through one of world sport's most engrossing rivalries. He knows as much as anybody about the heat of England v Australia battles, having played in three series wins and also the whitewash defeat of 2013-14 when its intensity ended his international career. However, it brought out some of his best displays in Test cricket. But he is just one of dozens of colourful characters to have added their chapters to this great tome. The mock obituary of English cricket in the Sporting Times of 1882 was the forerunner of summers and winters of heaven and hell, depending on which side of the divide you were situated. When it comes to on-field relations nothing quite compares to the over-my-dead-body feel of the Ashes. From Grace to Sir Don, the most graceful of them all. From the foulest play to the fairest - contrast the 1932-33 Bodyline series affair to the image of Andrew Flintoff hunched over a distraught Brett Lee in 2005. From Ray Illingworth's famous walk-off in the Seventies, when an England team-mate was assaulted by a spectator, to Steve Waugh's hugely emotional lap of honour when he retired a quarter of a century later. Swann's book will reveal the magic of a series that first gripped him in his front room in Northampton as an aspiring spin bowler in the mid-1980s.