DBWI AHC: Greater Manchester

SinghKing

Banned
Your Alternate History Challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create a plausible ATL where Greater Manchester is the second most populous conurbation in the United Kingdom, after Greater London, in the present day. Bonus points if the total population of Greater Manchester ITTL is more than half that of Greater London. Care to give it a shot? And how far back would the POD have to be?
 
Depending on how you count it, Manchester actually is the second largest urban area in the United Kingdom. I think a question that had aimed at either Birmingham or Manchester as being the unquestioned second city rather than neck and neck would be more interesting, and less debate-causing.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Depending on how you count it, Manchester actually is the second largest urban area in the United Kingdom. I think a question that had aimed at either Birmingham or Manchester as being the unquestioned second city rather than neck and neck would be more interesting, and less debate-causing.

What? No, it isn't. Everyone knows that Greater Birmingham, West Riding and Glasgow are all bigger and more populous than Greater Manchester- Greater Manchester's only got a population of about 1.28M people. Come on...

OOC: DBWI= Double Bluff What If. We're discussing this as though we're from an ATL where this isn't already the case.
 
What? No, it isn't. Everyone knows that Greater Birmingham, West Riding and Glasgow are all bigger and more populous than Greater Manchester- Greater Manchester's only got a population of about 1.28M people. Come on...

OOC: DBWI= Double Bluff What If. We're discussing this as though we're from an ATL where this isn't already the case.
OOC. God damn it! I'm unpracticed at these. I initially wrote a more relevant response, then deleted it after rereading the initial post after forgetting it was a DBWI...

I can't really think of anything good from an in-universe perspective. I think if you wanted to get a fairly insignificant city to create the conditions described in OTL, perhaps keep it mainly as a cotton manufacturing city in the late 19th and early 20th rather than having the economy diversify into finance and other industries. That would have Manchester even harder hit in the post war era, creating some kind of nightmarish world where areas like Blackley are mostly farmland even by ATL's 2014.

Here goes...

Back into ATL: Perhaps if Manchester became the center of finance for industry in Lancashire rather than most of the money coming all the way over from Leeds. If Manchester managed to diversify its economy in the latter part of the 19th century, not only would it ensure that it became a larger city later on, but it may do wonders for much of the rest of Lancashire. Liverpool in particular would grow, being the ideal location for Manchester's exports to the rest of the world. (Other major ports in the UK are way too far, and there were already good transport links between the two). So I guess they'd be like twin cities in that case. Perhaps if that happened, the North West wouldn't be seen as the most backward region of the United Kingdom.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Here goes...

Back into ATL: Perhaps if Manchester became the center of finance for industry in Lancashire rather than most of the money coming all the way over from Leeds. If Manchester managed to diversify its economy in the latter part of the 19th century, not only would it ensure that it became a larger city later on, but it may do wonders for much of the rest of Lancashire. Liverpool in particular would grow, being the ideal location for Manchester's exports to the rest of the world. (Other major ports in the UK are way too far, and there were already good transport links between the two). So I guess they'd be like twin cities in that case. Perhaps if that happened, the North West wouldn't be seen as the most backward region of the United Kingdom.

Hmm, I suppose that'd work. Although Liverpool is pretty far away from Manchester. And even IOTL, they could've been pretty well connected- wasn't that where John Greenwood established the world's first omnibus service? On the Manchester-to-Liverpool turnpike, in Pendleton? IOTL, he expanding it by adding routes to Sheffield, Halifax, Buxton and Chester; and his son, John Greenwood Jr, later amalgamated it into the West Riding Bus Company. So, WI Greenwood had added a daily route to Liverpool (albeit a somewhat circuitous one, given the need to travel around the uncrossable Chatmoss bog)? Would it be plausible for the establishment of a public transport link between the two cities, roughly fifty years earlier than they got connected with each other on the rail network IOTL, enable Manchester to expand more, increasing the size of its industrial economy and giving it a larger population ITTL?

Or would it be too little, too late? After all, Nantes' own omnibus system didn't really spur much growth in that city. And I'm not sure you can make Liverpool too much bigger than it got IOTL. I mean, what with the massive expansion of its docks, and all of those Irish immigrants which came flooding in during the Potato Famine, the city's population more than quadrupled over the course of in the 18th century from 80,000 in 1800 to around 340,000 in 1900. Even now, with its population on the rebound after its brief decline in the 70's, the Liverpool urban area's still no more populous than those of Hull and Plymouth. That's not that many extra people. Although- What about Blackpool? That's a decent sized port-city that's only a bit smaller than Liverpool, and it's in Lancashire as well, isn't it? Stagecoaches had been been running to Blackpool from Manchester from all the way back in 1781, so there's a historical basis there which we could build on. And Blackpool only got developed really late on IOTL as well- only got incorporated as a city in the 1870's, and in the hundred years between 1851 and 1951, its population mushroomed from 2,500 to 200,000 people! Almost a hundred-fold increase! Just imagine, if it had been developed as a proper port around a hundred years earlier- how large would Blackpool have been by now?
 
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Well, if it were, everyone would know and use the adjective Mancunian, instead of it being pretty obscure.

Ooc: oh well. Everyone SHOULD know it.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Well, if it were, everyone would know and use the adjective Mancunian, instead of it being pretty obscure.

Eh? :confused: I thought that people from Manchester were 'Mancestrians'. After all, they call people from Chester 'Cestrians', don't they? I just assumed it'd work in the same way...

OOC: ;) Chester is significantly larger and more important ITTL- without the construction of OTL's Mersey Railway Tunnel to connect it to Liverpool, the Wirral Peninsula (which only has 2/3rds of its OTL population ITTL, but still has a respectable population of over 200,000) is considered to be be part of the Chester Urban Area, in keeping with its historical status (Historically part of Cheshire, Wirral's boundary with the rest of Cheshire was officially "Two arrow falls from Chester City Walls" in the Domesday Book). This conurbanation is also known as 'Deeside', with the majority of its port cities and resort towns located in the Dee Estuary rather than in the Mersey Estuary, and has a total population of around 400,000.
 
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Well, since in OTL Manchester is clearly third after London and Birmingham (I'm basing it on this), you want to boost Manchester and/or knock Birmingham. I'm going to restrict myself to postwar PODs, since 19c Manchester was basically tied with Birmingham for second and PODs from that era could easily go either way.

The simplest possibility is to produce a trend that would merge Manchester and Liverpool into a single metro area. They're only 50 km apart, whereas Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which are part of the same metro region, are 70 km apart. So just posit that both cities suburbanized toward each other, until their urban agglomerations met. At this scale, you might not even need a specific POD - just run things a bit differently in the last 50 years and there you have it. If you do want a POD, posit that suburbanization specifically followed railroads, with investment in rail lines and subsidies for commuters. The Liverpool and Manchester would work as a commuter line for both cities, so the places in the middle would be joint suburbs of both cities. Moreover, rail investment would encourage the growth of Warrington as a junction station, forming a continuous Manchester-Warrington-Liverpool conurbation.

Another possibility: early devolution to regions in England would strengthen the regional capitals. This would boost both Birmingham and Manchester, but the Northwest/Greater Lancashire is larger than the Greater West Midlands, so Manchester would have more of a regional economy to tax. If Manchester centralized various functions that in the US and Canada tend to be run by states or provinces, like hospitals and the major area university, then it would be much larger. Of course, a larger Manchester is a Manchester whose urban sprawl has an easier time meeting Liverpool's...

A third possibility: in OTL, Birmingham remained a rich city until the 1970s, while Manchester declined after WW1 as the cotton mills moved to lower-wage places like the US. (That's why today the West Midlands have more immigrants than other non-London UK regions - immigrants don't move to where there are no jobs). So you want to produce trends that flip that. A less liberal UK government - whether socialist or corporatist - would do it, since Birmingham was a city of small businesses and Manchester was a city of factory owners and a proletariat; Birmingham's decline is in part due to taxes postwar Labour put on it. If postwar Britain fully adopted the tripartite system of negotiations among big government, big business, and big labor that Japan and most of the Continent used, then this would screw Birmingham while protecting Manchester.
 

SinghKing

Banned
Well, since in OTL Manchester is clearly third after London and Birmingham (I'm basing it on this), you want to boost Manchester and/or knock Birmingham. I'm going to restrict myself to postwar PODs, since 19c Manchester was basically tied with Birmingham for second and PODs from that era could easily go either way.

The simplest possibility is to produce a trend that would merge Manchester and Liverpool into a single metro area. They're only 50 km apart, whereas Amsterdam and Rotterdam, which are part of the same metro region, are 70 km apart. So just posit that both cities suburbanized toward each other, until their urban agglomerations met. At this scale, you might not even need a specific POD - just run things a bit differently in the last 50 years and there you have it. If you do want a POD, posit that suburbanization specifically followed railroads, with investment in rail lines and subsidies for commuters. The Liverpool and Manchester would work as a commuter line for both cities, so the places in the middle would be joint suburbs of both cities. Moreover, rail investment would encourage the growth of Warrington as a junction station, forming a continuous Manchester-Warrington-Liverpool conurbation.

Another possibility: early devolution to regions in England would strengthen the regional capitals. This would boost both Birmingham and Manchester, but the Northwest/Greater Lancashire is larger than the Greater West Midlands, so Manchester would have more of a regional economy to tax. If Manchester centralized various functions that in the US and Canada tend to be run by states or provinces, like hospitals and the major area university, then it would be much larger. Of course, a larger Manchester is a Manchester whose urban sprawl has an easier time meeting Liverpool's...

A third possibility: in OTL, Birmingham remained a rich city until the 1970s, while Manchester declined after WW1 as the cotton mills moved to lower-wage places like the US. (That's why today the West Midlands have more immigrants than other non-London UK regions - immigrants don't move to where there are no jobs). So you want to produce trends that flip that. A less liberal UK government - whether socialist or corporatist - would do it, since Birmingham was a city of small businesses and Manchester was a city of factory owners and a proletariat; Birmingham's decline is in part due to taxes postwar Labour put on it. If postwar Britain fully adopted the tripartite system of negotiations among big government, big business, and big labor that Japan and most of the Continent used, then this would screw Birmingham while protecting Manchester.

OOC: Come on, read the OP. And all of the other posts since then. This is a DBWI AHC, not a regular AHC. ITTL, the Metropolitan Areas of Greater Birmingham, West Riding (an amalgam of OTL's West Yorkshire and Sheffield metropolitan areas, excluding the city of Leeds itself) and Glasgow are all bigger and more populous than Greater Manchester, which only has a population of about 1.28M people.
 
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Okay, then maybe I didn't understand the DB concept well enough. Could you explain a bit more?
 

SinghKing

Banned
Okay, then maybe I didn't understand the DB concept well enough. Could you explain a bit more?

With a Double Bluff What If, we're discussing things as though we're from a alternate timeline in which it didn't happen. Admittedly, it's debatable whether Greater Manchester is actually the second most populous conurbation in the United Kingdom IOTL (I was going by this list instead), but even going by your other list, it's still close enough for it not to be a particularly challenging AHC IOTL. ITTL, the TL where we're discussing this from, it's substantially more of a challenge. ITTL, Greater Manchester's 4th on the list of urban areas by population (5th, incl. Scotland) and 6th on the list of metropolitan areas by population.
 
Okay, so what's the POD for the DB ATL? In other words, why is Manchester no longer the 3rd largest city?
 

SinghKing

Banned
Okay, so what's the POD for the DB ATL? In other words, why is Manchester no longer the 3rd largest city?

OOC: Already dropped a couple of subtle hints back in post #5. Bolding the important bits...

...they could've been pretty well connected- wasn't that where John Greenwood established the world's first omnibus service*? On the Manchester-to-Liverpool turnpike, in Pendleton? IOTL, he expanding it by adding routes to Sheffield, Halifax, Buxton and Chester; and his son, John Greenwood Jr, later amalgamated it into the West Riding Bus Company. So, WI Greenwood had added a daily route to Liverpool (albeit a somewhat circuitous one, given the need to travel around the uncrossable Chatmoss bog)? Would it be plausible for the establishment of a public transport link between the two cities, roughly fifty years earlier than they got connected with each other on the rail network IOTL...

*In 1824, both IOTL and ITTL.
 
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