Manchester, currently hosting Labour’s annual conference, has a long history of left-wing politics: Marxist Friedrich Engels lived there for several years to work at his German family’s textile factory and was even inspired by social conditions in the city to write a book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1944.
Here are some other things you probably didn’t know about Manchester…
• Manchester began life as a Roman settlement around AD 80 and was named Mamucium, which – according to A Dictionary of Place Names from Oxford University Press - means ‘breast-shaped hill’. By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it was called Mamecester before the name eventually changed to Manchester.
• It was a small, inconsequential town in Lancashire until the Industrial Revolution kick-started in the area and turned everything on its head. Dubbed ‘Cottonopolis’ at the time, it became a centre for the textile industry in the 19th century and its population grew rapidly.
• Thanks to the number of Irish workers who headed to the city during this time, it’s now estimated that 35% of the population of Manchester and Salford has some Irish ancestry.
• The now defunct Independent Labour Party, The Manchester Guardian (now The Guardian) and the Trade Union Congress were all set up there.
• The world’s first passenger railway, opened in 1830, ran between Manchester and Liverpool.
• The first atom was split at Manchester University in 1919.
• In 2010 Manchester was ranked as Europe’s top city for business competitiveness and a KPMG survey this month showed that businesses in Manchester pay the ninth-lowest taxes of any large industrialised city in the world.
We represent Manchester serviced apartments in locations across the city including Salford Quays, Deansgate and the Northern Quarter.
