Three stripes and three sails

This is a maybe going to be a series of about ten posts. Thoughts welcome.....

November 2009
Manchester is city like no other. The world's first industrial city, home to three and a half millions people from the cosmopolitan, thriving city centre, to industrial suburbs such as Chowbent and semi-suburban villages and market towns like Ramsbotham, Blackrod and Littleboro.

The metropolis is the cultural centre for the Palatinate - the locals go one further and claim it be more so even than London, with whom it has shared a rivalry for almost two centuries. Art, education and music are all core to Mancunian life, but nothing permeates society more than sport, especially football.

Like the rest of British Isles, the handling code holds sway, and clubs such as Hulme FC, Manchester Rovers and Maccabi Cheetham compete with the best clubs in Europe. Regardless of coal, textiles and engineering - if you ask a local, football was the greatest export of this city.

The tourist is advised to begin his or her visit in St Peters Square, site of The Memorial to the People, and, whilst jammed with foreign students, is a must for anyone wishing to understand the rise in prominence of "Mancunia" during the nineteenth century.

A short walk to Deansgate Fields and the Great Northern Railway Buildings dominate the scene. From here you can catch express trains to destinations across Europe, and the grandeur of the Industrial Gothic is striking like in no other Revolutionary period British city.

For lovers of achitecture, a short walk along Deansgate towards the River Irwell brings into contention the Parliament Buildings. Completed in 1894, the complex of palatial structures sets the tone of the government quarter from Liverpool Street to Bridge Street, and the wealth of what was originally the south and west of the city is striking in these districts.

For the more modern thinker, the east of the city is worth seeing. Home to a major regeneration project in the 1980s, districts such as Ardwick, are home to modern glass-fronted office buildings and apartments that match those of found in the America's. For the Mancunian, replacing the past in favour of the modern is the raison-detre of the city.

But that does not mean the antiquity of the aincient city cannot be seen. The Cathedral Quarter and Chapel Street show what Manchester was like before the Revolutions. Salford still retains the atmosphere of the city within a city, and the popular Blackfriars Market is a cultural district to rival any equivalent in London or Paris. The mediaeval buildings of this district were once, believe it or not, slums, fit only for those that even the Revolutions did not want to know. But by the 1950s their importace was being seen by tourists and today the properties make sums on the real estate market that would bring disbelief in former residents.

The city is criss-crossed by a network of public rail - both overground and under it, being home to the Great Metropolitan Railway. From Wigan to Staley Brigg, affordable public transport puts the city centre within half-an-hour of some four millions.

The World's first industrial city is a thriving magnet for cultures from across the planet. It was this culture of inclusiveness with a rebellious swagger that attracted first peoples from across Europe - the Jews that settled in the north of the city; the French artisans and surgeons that built the cultural hotspot of the Wilmsleu Road. In Salford, in the docklands districts that built the city, you have the former dark quarter, where freed slaves would settle. It was this combination of African music and Mancunian inclusivness that helped make Blackfriars such a melting pot by the end of the nineteenth century.

There is no place quite like Manchester, whose inhabitants fly the red rose of the Paltinate, along with the city shield of three stripes and three sails like a badge of pride.
 
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