page_title: Cottonopolis
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Cottonopolis / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Ancoats Mills. A very important collection of old cotton mills dating back in parts to 1798.
context_page_description: Cottonopolis was a 19th-century nickname for Manchester, as it was a metropolis and the centre of the cotton industry.
  The Manchester warehouse which we lately visited, was a building fit for the Town Hall of any respectable municipality; a stately, spacious, and tasteful edifice; rich and substantial as its respectable proprietors, the well-known firm of Banneret and Co. There are nearly a hundred such buildings in Manchester; –not so large, perhaps, for this is the largest; but all in their degree worthy of Cottonopolis.
  — Lowe J, A Manchester warehouse, Household Words 9 269
context_section_description: Early cotton mills powered by water were built in Lancashire and its neighbouring counties. In 1781 Richard Arkwright opened the world's first steam-driven textile mill on Miller Street in Manchester. Although initially inefficient, the arrival of steam power signified the beginning of the mechanisation that was to enhance the burgeoning textile industries in Manchester into the world's first centre of mass production. As textile manufacture switched from the home to factories, Manchester and towns in south and east Lancashire became the largest and most productive cotton spinning centre in the world using in 1871, 32% of global cotton production. Ancoats, part of a planned expansion of Manchester, became the first industrial suburb centred on steam power. There were mills whose architectural innovations included fireproofing by use of iron and reinforced concrete.
  The number of cotton mills on Manchester peaked at 108 in 1853. As the numbers declined, cotton mills opened in the surrounding towns, Bury, Oldham (at its zenith the most productive cotton spinning town in the world), Rochdale, Bolton (known as "Spindleton" in 1892) and in Blackburn, Darwen, Rawtenstall, Todmorden and Burnley. As the manufacturing centre of Manchester shrank, the commercial centre, warehouses, banks and services for the 280 cotton towns and villages within a 12-mile radius of the Royal Exchange grew. The term "Cottonopolis" came into use in about 1870.
  Manchester became an important transport hub, the Bridgewater Canal made it possible to transport goods in bulk to its terminus at Castlefield  warehouses were built. Raw cotton, imported through the port of Liverpool from the West Indies and southern states of America, and coal from Worsley were carried on the canal. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway built a warehouse at its Liverpool Road terminus when it opened in 1830. The railway network developed linking Manchester to its increasingly industrialised hinterland.
caption: Cotton mills in Ancoats
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