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Reviewed by:
  • Manchester: Making the Modern City ed. by Alan Kidd, Terry Wyke, and: Birmingham: The Workshop of the World ed. by Carl Chinn, Malcolm Dick
  • Brian Lewis (bio)
Manchester: Making the Modern City, edited by Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke; pp. xi + 436. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, £35.00, £14.95 paper, $64.04, $34.94 paper.
Birmingham: The Workshop of the World, edited by Carl Chinn and Malcolm Dick; pp. ix + 334. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016, £35.00, £14.95 paper, $60.00, $34.95 paper.

Is urban biography coming back into fashion in British universities? The long tradition of lovingly crafted individual town histories, often celebratory in tone and antiquarian in detail, was largely superseded by the new urban history from the 1960s. The new emphasis was not on the particular and the idiosyncratic, with scant reference to external forces, but rather on socioeconomic, spatial, and cultural urban processes. To be sure, local historians, both amateur and professional, continued to write town and city biographies—usually well illustrated, succinct, and affordable for a general, non-specialized readership—but these were not the main concerns of the academy. Two swallows do not a summer make, or books a trend. But do these handsome volumes—Manchester: Making the Modern City and Birmingham: The Workshop of the World—presage a shift in historians’ emphases, or are they curious anomalies?

As the old adage puts it, what Manchester thinks today London will think tomorrow. Mancunians have never been shy to tout their achievements, and the contributors to the Manchester volume, who hail from Manchester and Lancashire universities, continue this tendency. “Manchester is one of a select band of cities that have left their mark on human history,” write Alan Kidd and Terry Wyke in their introduction, “Every town and city has its story, but few have one that belongs to the world” (1). “The story of the making of modern Manchester,” they continue, “is also the story of the making of the modern world” (1). This is their principal justification for the return to urban biography, at least in this one instance: Manchester is special.

The contributors convincingly make the case in a succession of chapters covering pre-industrial Manchester; the industrial city; science and technology; radical politics; cosmopolitan Manchester; culture and sport; the suburbs; and the contemporary, post-industrial city. Cottonpolis (Manchester’s nineteenth-century nickname) was the first industrial city, the shock city of the age. It spawned the ideologies of both liberal capitalism (Free Trade, the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Manchester School) and its antithesis (inspiring Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their articulation of revolutionary communism). Britain’s first true canal, the Bridgewater Canal from the Worsley coal mines to Manchester, opened in 1761. The country’s first horse-drawn omnibus began operating in Manchester in 1824. The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the real beginning of the railway age. Modern suburbanization patterns first developed in Manchester. The city was the site of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, that defining event in the history of radicalism; it was the birthplace of the Trades Union Congress and of the Co-operative Wholesale Society; it is where the leading suffragettes, the Pankhurst family, established the Women’s Social and Political Union; and, in more recent decades, it has been at the forefront of gay activism. With a long history of immigration—from the Irish to Jews to Pakistanis to Afro-Caribbeans to Chinese and many others—Manchester developed into one of the most ethnically diverse [End Page 514] cities in Europe. Scientific luminaries such as John Dalton, James Prescott Joule, Ernest Rutherford, and Alan Turing spent all or part of their careers in Manchester. Culturally it has had a dramatic impact across Britain and beyond. One need only make a partial list—the Manchester Guardian, the Hallé Orchestra, the television soaps Coronation Street (1960-present) and Queer as Folk (1999–2000), the soccer clubs Manchester United and Manchester City, the “Madchester” music scene of the 1980s and 1990s—to make the point. Even Manchester’s decline and resurgence were special. The cotton industry and manufacturing in general collapsed between the...

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