page_title: History of Manchester
section_title: Industrial Revolution
hierarchical_section_title: History of Manchester / Industrial Revolution
caption_attribution_description: English: Later rendered as an engraving entitled Cottonopolis by Edward Goodall
context_page_description: The history of Manchester encompasses its change from a minor Lancastrian township into the pre-eminent industrial metropolis of the United Kingdom and the world. Manchester began expanding "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century as part of a process of unplanned urbanisation brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. The transformation took little more than a century.
  Having evolved from a Roman castrum in Celtic Britain, in the Victorian era Manchester was a major locus of the Industrial Revolution, and was the site of one of the world's first passenger railway stations as well as many scientific achievements of great importance. Manchester also led the political and economic reform of 19th century Britain as the vanguard of free trade. The mid-20th century saw a decline in Manchester's industrial importance, prompting a depression in social and economic conditions. Subsequent investment, gentrification and rebranding from the 1990s onwards changed its fortunes and reinvigorated Manchester as a post-industrial city with multiple sporting, broadcasting and educational institutions.
context_section_description: Manchester remained a small market town until the late 18th century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Spinning Jenny in 1764 marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and brought with it the first fully mechanised production process, although some sources define the start of the Industrial Revolution as July 1761, when the Duke of Bridgewater's canal reached Castlefield. The myriad small valleys in the Pennine Hills to the north and east of the town, combined with the damp climate, proved ideal for the construction of water-powered cotton mills such as Quarry Bank Mill, which industrialised the spinning and weaving of cloth.
  Indeed, it was the importing of cotton, which began towards the end of the 18th century, that revolutionised the textile industry in the area. This new commodity was imported through the port of Liverpool, which was connected with Manchester by the Mersey and Irwell Navigation—the two rivers had been made navigable from the 1720s onwards.
  Manchester now developed as the natural distribution centre for raw cotton and spun yarn, and a marketplace and distribution centre for the products of this growing textile industry. Richard Arkwright is credited as the first to erect a cotton mill in the city. His first experiment, installing a Newcomen steam engine to pump water for a waterwheel failed, but he next adapted a Watt steam engine to directly operate the machinery. The result was the rapid spread of cotton mills throughout Manchester itself and in the surrounding towns. To these must be added bleach works, textile print works, and the engineering workshops and foundries, all serving the cotton industry. During the mid-19th century Manchester grew to become the centre of Lancashire's cotton industry and was dubbed "Cottonopolis", and a branch of the Bank of England was established in 1826.
  The city had one of the first telephone exchanges in Europe (possibly the first in the UK) when in 1879 one was opened on Faulkner Street in the city centre using the Bell patent system. By 1881 it had 420 subscribers—just 7 years later a new exchange had the capacity for 10 times that number. Manchester Central exchange was still the largest outside the capital in Edwardian times when it employed 200 operators and the city had several other important roles in the history of telephony.
caption: Manchester from Kersal Moor, by William Wyld in 1852. Manchester acquired the nickname Cottonopolis during the early 19th century owing to its many textile factories.
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