Cottonopolis

• 1. Introduction

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  Cottonopolis stood at the center of an industrial web without parallel in the 19th century. Within 12 miles of Manchester's center, 280 towns and villages had organized themselves around the cotton trade. Lancashire held four million people by the close of the century. More than a quarter of them worked in industry.

  The name itself entered common use around 1870, by which time Manchester had spent nearly a century as the hub of global cotton manufacturing. How one city came to hold that position, what it built to sustain it, and what it left behind are the questions Cottonopolis invites.

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• 2. Steam and Spindle

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  Richard Arkwright opened the world's first steam-driven textile mill on Miller Street in Manchester in 1781. The engine was initially inefficient. What it represented was irreversible: the shift of cloth-making from homes to factories, powered not by water wheels but by coal.

  Ancoats, built as a planned expansion of Manchester, became the world's first industrial suburb centered on steam. Its mills introduced architectural innovations that later became standard, including fireproofing through iron and reinforced concrete. As the mills spread through Manchester and the towns of south and east Lancashire, the region grew. It became the largest and most productive cotton-spinning centre the world had seen. By 1871, these mills together consumed 32% of all cotton produced globally.

  Manchester's own count of cotton mills peaked at 108 in 1853. As that number fell, the surrounding towns absorbed more of the work. Oldham reached a point where it was the most productive cotton-spinning town anywhere on earth. Bolton earned its own nickname, 'Spindleton,' in use by 1892. Bury, Rochdale, Blackburn, Darwen, Rawtenstall, Todmorden, and Burnley each became nodes in the same productive network.

  Raw cotton arrived through Liverpool, sourced from the West Indies and the southern states of America. When Civil War cut off American supply, Britain's colony on the Indian subcontinent stepped in. Coal came from Worsley, carried along the Bridgewater Canal to Castlefield. When the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, it added a warehouse at its Liverpool Road terminus. Rail steadily extended the industrial hinterland from there. Three-quarters of the textiles produced were exported, handled by foreign companies operating through the Port of Manchester.

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• 3. The Royal Exchange

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  Sir Oswald Mosley built Manchester's first exchange in 1727 as a place for chapmen, the traveling merchants of the period, to transact business. That original building was reconstructed three times over the following two centuries.

  Thomas Harrison designed the second major structure in the Greek Revival style, completing it between 1806 and 1809. Membership was required to enter, and trading was not restricted to textiles. Its early members were owners of mills and warehouses; over time their agents and managers took over much of the day-to-day business. Alex Mills enlarged the building between 1847 and 1849.

  Queen Victoria visited in 1851 and granted it the title the Manchester Royal Exchange. The third building on the site, designed by the firm of Mills and Murgatroyd, opened in 1874. Built in the Classical style with Corinthian columns and a dome, it was more imposing than its predecessors.

  Architects Bradshaw Gass & Hope rebuilt the Royal Exchange between 1914 and 1921. The result was, at the time, the largest trading room in the world. Its hall rose 29.2 metres and covered an area of 3,683 square metres. Beneath a central glass dome 38.5 metres high, up to 11,000 cotton merchants gathered every Tuesday and Friday to buy and sell.

  The bombs of World War Two badly damaged the building. Cotton trading ceased there in 1968, leaving the glass-domed hall with no occupant and no clear future.

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• 4. Warehouse City

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  The firm of Banneret and Co. occupied one of Manchester's great warehouses. One visitor described it as 'a building fit for the Town Hall of any respectable municipality.' Its Manchester neighbors numbered nearly a hundred similar structures.

  In 1806, the city held just over 1,000 warehouses. By 1815, that figure had nearly doubled to 1,819. Manchester came to be known as 'warehouse city' alongside its grander epithet.

  The earliest of these buildings clustered around King Street. By 1850 they had spread to Portland Street, and later to Whitworth Street. Richard Cobden's construction on Mosley Street was the first palazzo-style warehouse in Manchester. The elaborate Watts Warehouse followed in 1854.

  On Whitworth Street, three packing warehouses named Asia House, India House, and Velvet House ranked among the tallest buildings of their time. Johann Georg Kohl walked these streets in 1844 and wrote about what he found. He described streets lined with warehouses five and six stories high, some 'stately and elegant,' and at night 'brilliantly lighted from top to bottom.' These buildings stored the finished goods and displayed them to buyers. Their owners financed ornate banks and offices nearby, providing loans for cotton production and the industries that served it.

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• 5. Counting Houses

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  Arthur Heywood's Bank opened in Manchester in 1772, but its operations were limited by geography from the start. Each day, the money it held was transferred by coach to the major banks in London. Those coaches were attacked by highwaymen on more than one occasion.

  The Bank of Manchester changed that when it opened on Market Street in 1829. It was the first institution in the city to hold its own reserves of notes and coins. The Manchester & Liverpool District Bank followed on Spring Gardens in 1832, and others arrived along Fountain Street and King Street in the same years.

  The Reform Act of 1832 created two parliamentary seats for Manchester, and civic institutions developed in step. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 permitted elections for magistrates, borough councillors, and aldermen. Manchester received municipal borough status in 1838, giving the city the legal standing to govern itself.

  Spring Gardens, Fountain Street, and King Street had become Manchester's banking and commercial core. The factories were still productive. The city's real power now lay in its ability to finance and organise trade rather than merely produce it.

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• 6. The Long Echo

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  The texts gathered in 'Spinning the Web,' later adapted for BBC Radio 4, preserved several 19th-century accounts of Manchester. One writer called it a 'famous great factory town,' dark and smoky from coal vapours. 'Work, profit and greed seem to be the only thoughts here,' the same account continued. Another counted 300,000 people at work in what it called 'this unending damp and dark labyrinth.' A third set down a first impression from memory: 'I saw the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke.' That smoke, the same account continued, formed 'an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the whole place.'

  Dozens of 18th- and 19th-century cotton mills, canals, and supporting bridges from the Cottonopolis era survive across the region. The compact Victorian commercial centre of central Manchester is cited as the finest example of its kind in the United Kingdom.

  Renovation work in 1972 transformed the Royal Exchange into a theatre. It came to be regarded as one of the most prolific and highly regarded venues outside London. An IRA bomb severely damaged it in 1996. The 32 million pound reconstruction that followed showed what the building still meant. Long after cotton had stopped trading beneath its glass dome, the Royal Exchange remained something Manchester was not willing to lose.

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