Manchester Manchester is a city in the north - west of England . Although it covers an area of only 44 . 65 square miles and has a population of just over half a million residents , it is the largest one by some considerable margin of the ten metropolitan boroughs which make up the county of Greater Manchester . The is an area of land defined by the Office for National Statistics ( ONS ) , consisting of the large conurbation that encompasses the urban element of the City of Manchester and the continuous metropolitan area that spreads outwards from it , forming much of Greater Manchester in North West England . With the latter ’ s population of 2 , 553 , 379 , it is the second most populous conurbation in the United Kingdom after the Greater London Built - up Area and the thirteenth largest in the European Union . The history of Manchester began with the Roman fort of Mamucium , ( from which is derived the name of the city ’ s inhabitants - Mancunians ) which was established around AD 79 near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell . Thereafter it remained a small and unimportant town until the 14th century , when it received an influx of Flemish weavers who established it as a centre of textile manufacturing . This expanded at a considerable rate in the 1700s with the opening up of navigable waterways including the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 , bringing coal from mines at Worsley to central Manchester which , when extended to Runcorn , halved the cost of the transport of raw cotton shipped in from the United States of America . Richard Arkwright opened his first mill for spinning cotton in 1780 in Manchester which included a number of his own inventions for industrialising the process and the town expanded at such a rate that by 1835 it was " without challenge the first and greatest industrial city in the world ” . Its adjoining settlements , such as Salford , expanded at the same rate . Along with several hundred mills , the surrounding lands were quickly urbanised to provide accommodation for its workers . This formed the basis for the world depicted in " Coronation Street " : a working class community living in a typical terraced street of houses within an industrialised landscape built in the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century . All over Manchester and its surrounding towns and boroughs many such streets sprang up , many of them low - cost builds with basic amenities whose residents were constantly on the breadline and who suffered badly in times of recession and depression but who nevertheless built up a strong sense of community with a combination of self - help and neighbourly togetherness . In parts of the real Manchester , typically those near the earliest mills , rank poverty was the way of life of the people who survived day - to - day in squalor during the Victorian times . This existence brought in a strong reaction against its conditions and Manchester was considered for many years a centre of left - wing politics . ' work " " in 1844 was based on a two year stay in Manchester and Karl Marx visited him there and saw the conditions for himself . The Cooperative movement began in nearby Rochdale and the first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester in 1868 . The industrial base of Manchester , granted “ city status ” in 1853 ( as was Salford in 1926 ) declined in the early to mid - Twentieth Century , ironically just before the prosperity of many of its inhabitants improved . The area overcame the loss of large parts of its older industries and began to rely more and more upon its newer ones such as media and technology . This included the beginning of Granada Television in the city on 3rd May 1956 whose studios were based on the extreme west - side of the city centre on the site of former industrial buildings . Until 1974 , Manchester was within the county of Lancashire but the establishment of the county of Greater Manchester in that year created its own major conurbation . For many people outside of the region , the city of Manchester is still synonymous with the county of Greater Manchester but people in the adjoining areas , especially Salford , have a strong sense of their own local identity . Within the fictional world of " Coronation Street " , Weatherfield is an eleventh borough within the county with its own by - laws , Town Hall , Council , infrastructure and history although the design of the street , based on Archie Street in Salford and demolished in 1971 , and the amount of filming conducted in that area over the years , means that for many people Weatherfield is a fictional depiction of Salford . In the 1950s and for twenty years thereafter , the vast majority of the poorer types of housing were demolished in slum clearances although the housing that replaced them at the time , including high - rise flats and other “ brutalist ” forms for architecture , arguably didn ’ t improve matters for many . Some housing schemes such as the overspill estates in areas such as Wythenshawe gave a considerable increase in the standard of living for many though . Today , the number of terraced streets in Manchester and its surrounding areas is low in number compared to previous years but many still remain . Various parts of the city of Manchester have been used for location filming of " Coronation Street " since the 1960s and the fact that the Granada , later renamed ITV , studios existed in the city until the end of 2013 means that the vast majority of " Coronation Street " ’ s narrative has been produced , rehearsed and recorded in the city . The Media City studios are now based in the Borough of Trafford on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal but they are still within the county of Greater Manchester . Many of the city ’ s landmarks and buildings have been seen in the programme over the years including Albert Square outside the Town Hall , the Manchester Central Library and Manchester Airport , the third largest in the country . Almost all inhabitants of the county refer to the city centre of Manchester as “ town ” and any reference by any character within the programme to “ going into town ” almost always means a trip into the centre of Manchester . The number of times that Manchester has been depicted within the programme as a real place as opposed to the fictional Borough of Weatherfield means that there have been too many instances , many of them one - line references , for them to be listed in this article . See also . Buildings Transport Sport and leisure Other