In 1835, a visiting French aristocrat described Manchester as a filthy sewer from which pure gold flowed.
In part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain, we follow Manchester's explosive rise as the world's first industrial city, and the people who fought to make it a place fit to live in.
Tap a purple word for its meaning. Tap a time to play from there.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's time for part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:30] In part one, we saw how Edinburgh lost its parliament and then reinvented itself as the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:38] In part three, we'll finish in Bristol, the city that opened England's door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:00:49] But today, we are moving to the city where all those clever Scottish ideas about markets and machines turned into smoke, noise and money: Manchester, the first industrial city on Earth.
[00:01:05] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] When you first think of Manchester, perhaps a few things come to mind. If you're a football fan, you might think of its two clubs: Manchester United and Manchester City.
[00:01:25] If you're a music fan, you probably know that bands such as Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division and The Stone Roses are all from Manchester.
[00:01:37] It's somewhere between the fifth and the seventh largest city in the UK, depending on how you count it, but it packs a serious cultural punch.
[00:01:48] For most of its history, though, nobody outside the north of England had much reason to think about it at all. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, it became the most talked-about city on the planet.
[00:02:06] In the summer of 1835, a young French aristocrat stepped off a coach in Manchester.
[00:02:14] His name was Alexis de Tocqueville. He was touring Britain to understand the forces that were changing the world, and everyone had told him the same thing: you must see Manchester.
[00:02:32] What he found astonished him. Huge six-storey factories, wreathed in black smoke. Crowds of pale workers streaming through muddy streets. Palaces of industry standing next to some of the worst slums in Europe.
[00:02:53] He sat down and wrote one of the most famous descriptions of any city, ever. "From this foul drain," he wrote, "the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows."
[00:03:13] To understand how Manchester became that city, we need to go back to the 1770s.
[00:03:20] It was then a market town in the north-west of England, home to around twenty-five thousand people. It had no city walls, no cathedral status, no member of parliament, and no particular claim to fame beyond a busy trade in cloth.
[00:03:39] Then it exploded. By 1802 the population had reached around ninety-five thousand. By the census of 1851, it was over three hundred thousand.
[00:03:56] Nothing this fast had ever happened to a city before. There were no plans, no real building regulations, and no map that stayed accurate for more than a few years.
[00:04:09] What drove it all was cotton.
[00:04:14] Manchester, it turned out, had everything the new cotton industry needed. A damp climate that stopped the delicate threads from snapping. Coalfields nearby to power the mills. A port, Liverpool, just thirty miles away, bringing in raw cotton from across the Atlantic.
[00:04:36] And it had canals for easy, cheap transportation.
[00:04:40] In 1761, the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal to bring coal from his mines into the town, and the price of coal in Manchester roughly halved.
[00:04:52] Cheap coal meant cheap steam power.
[00:04:57] Then came the machines. Spinning machines that could do the work of a hundred human hands, powered first by water, then by steam.
[00:05:08] Manchester's genius was to put all of this together, on a scale nobody had attempted before. It became the first city in the world whose whole economy was built around steam-powered factories.
[00:05:24] In one district, Ancoats, mills of six, seven and eight storeys rose side by side along the canals.
[00:05:33] Ancoats is often called the world's first industrial suburb: a neighbourhood built for factories, not for people, though tens of thousands of people lived there all the same.
[00:05:47] By the second half of the century, Manchester and the mill towns around it were processing roughly a third of all the cotton grown on Earth. They called it Cottonopolis: the city of cotton.
[00:06:03] Cloth spun and woven here dressed people in Europe, Africa, India and the Americas. If you wore clothes made of cotton, there was a good chance they had been made, in part, in this great industrial city.
[00:06:19] Now, to give you a sense of what was actually happening in these cotton mills, if you were to step inside one, the first thing that would hit you was the noise.
[00:06:31] Hundreds of machines hammering away in one vast room, hour after hour. Many workers went partly deaf, and mill workers developed their own way of communicating: an exaggerated, silent mouthing of words, so they could lip-read one another over the roar.
[00:06:54] The air was kept hot and damp, because warm, moist air was better for the cotton thread. Temperatures inside could reach thirty degrees. The air was also thick with cotton dust, and these fine white fibres would be breathed in by workers, settle in their lungs and, over the years, slowly destroy them.
[00:07:21] The working day was twelve hours or more, six days a week.
[00:07:26] And the machines did not forgive mistakes. Fingers and hands would be lost in the machines. And if you were really unlucky, incidents could be fatal.
[00:07:39] And everywhere, there were children.
[00:07:43] Small children were prized in the mills because they were small. They worked as scavengers, crawling underneath the moving machinery to sweep up the loose cotton, while the machines thundered on above their heads. Some started at seven or eight years old, and of course they were just as likely to lose a finger, or even be killed if their clothes got caught in the works.
[00:08:11] Outside the factory gates, things weren't much better. Housing was thrown up as fast and cheaply as possible, and whole families lived in single damp cellar rooms.
[00:08:25] In the worst districts, one toilet might serve dozens of families, and drinking water came from rivers that ran black with dye and waste.
[00:08:38] In 1842, a government report put numbers on what this did to people. Among Manchester's labourers and their families, the average age at death was just seventeen.
[00:08:54] Now, this is dragged down by deaths in childhood, but it still gives you some idea.
[00:09:01] In the rural county of Rutland, the equivalent figure was thirty-eight, more than twice as high.
[00:09:09] Conditions were awful, and they were plain for anyone to see.
[00:09:15] In December 1842, a twenty-two-year-old German arrived in the city.
[00:09:22] His father was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and had sent him to work in the office of the family firm, partly to knock some radical political ideas out of the young man's head.
[00:09:36] His time in Manchester had precisely the opposite effect.
[00:09:42] His name was Friedrich Engels.
[00:09:46] By day, he worked as a respectable clerk in the family business, shaking hands with mill owners and merchants.
[00:09:55] In his free time, he walked the slums, taking notes on everything he saw.
[00:10:01] The result was a book which he published in 1845 with the title The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a furious, very detailed catalogue of how Manchester's workers lived and died.
[00:10:19] Engels sent his findings to a friend of his, another German thinker, called Karl Marx.
[00:10:27] And as you may know, three years later the two men would put their thoughts together, with the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
[00:10:38] Modern communism, in other words, has Manchester deep in its roots. Long before any revolution in Russia, its raw material was gathered in the slums beside the mills.
[00:10:51] Now, the people of Manchester did not need a German philosopher to tell them something was wrong. It was clear to see, and they had been saying it themselves for decades.
[00:11:03] And they had been trying to do something about it.
[00:11:07] See, for most of this period of explosive growth, this world-famous city of hundreds of thousands of people had not a single member of parliament of its own.
[00:11:19] Ordinary working people could not vote at all. So when bad harvests and high bread prices meant they went hungry, they had no legal way to change anything.
[00:11:33] So they organised. And on the 16th of August 1819, on an open space in the centre of town called St Peter's Field, they held the largest political meeting Britain had ever seen.
[00:11:51] Tens of thousands of men, women and children walked in from the mill towns, dressed in their Sunday best, their best clothes.
[00:12:01] They carried banners demanding the vote, and poles topped with red caps, the old symbol of liberty. The mood, witnesses said, was closer to a festival than a protest.
[00:12:15] They had come to listen to Henry Hunt, the most famous radical speaker in the country, a man known for his white top hat and his booming voice.
[00:12:27] The local magistrates were watching from a house at the edge of the field, and they saw it all very differently.
[00:12:36] To them, this looked like the beginning of a revolution. They ordered Hunt's arrest, and they sent in cavalry to carry it out.
[00:12:47] Some of the horsemen were local businessmen in uniform, and some of them had been drinking heavily. They drew their sabres, their curved cavalry swords, and rode into the densely packed crowd.
[00:13:03] The first victim never even reached the meeting. A two-year-old boy was knocked out of his mother's arms by a galloping horse on a nearby street, minutes before the charge began, and died.
[00:13:16] In the field itself, people had nowhere to run. Around eighteen died, cut down by the horsemen's swords or trampled under the horses' hooves.
[00:13:29] Several hundred more were injured. And many of the injured hid their wounds afterwards, terrified of losing their jobs if their employers learnt they had been at the meeting.
[00:13:43] Within days, a radical Manchester newspaper had given the event the name that stuck: Peterloo. St Peter's Field plus Waterloo, which was a dark joke at the expense of an army that had turned its swords on its own people.
[00:14:00] Peterloo shocked the country. The government's response was not to apologise, but to send the magistrates a letter of thanks.
[00:14:12] The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre, and its consequences ran deep.
[00:14:20] A young Manchester cotton merchant named John Edward Taylor, who had witnessed the massacre, decided the city needed an honest newspaper.
[00:14:30] In 1821, he founded the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps you've read it, albeit under its modern name, simply The Guardian. It's one of the most read newspapers in the world, and has a strong centre-left, workers-first worldview.
[00:14:49] After the massacre, little by little, it seemed like the government started to listen.
[00:14:57] In 1832, a great reform of parliament finally gave Manchester its own MPs. The vote for ordinary working people took far longer, another century of campaigning, but this wasn't unique to Manchester.
[00:15:13] Now, moving forward a few decades, in the 1860s, the cotton industry faced a crisis.
[00:15:22] In 1861, a civil war broke out in the United States, and the North blockaded the ports of the slave-owning South.
[00:15:33] After all, all that raw cotton had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was the plantations of the Americas, picked by slaves whose working conditions made those of the Manchester factory workers look positively Scandinavian.
[00:15:51] But in 1861, the raw cotton stopped coming.
[00:15:57] The result in Lancashire was known as the Cotton Famine. Mills closed by the hundred, and mill workers and their families went hungry.
[00:16:08] For these workers, a British deal with the South would have meant the cotton flowing again, the mills reopening, and bread on the table.
[00:16:18] Yet the workers gathered at a great public meeting and declared their support for the North, for President Lincoln, and for the end of slavery.
[00:16:31] Lincoln was moved enough to write back, addressing his letter not to the Queen or to any official, but to the working men of Manchester.
[00:16:43] He called their stance an act of heroism that had not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
[00:16:51] Their own children were going hungry because of the blockade.
[00:16:55] Yet they looked at the enslaved people on the other side of the ocean, the people who grew the cotton they spun, and took their side.
[00:17:06] There is a statue of Lincoln in Manchester to this day, with words from that letter carved beneath it.
[00:17:14] Now, moving forward another forty years or so, I must tell you about another thing Manchester is famous for. In 1903, a Manchester widow called Emmeline Pankhurst sat down with her daughters and a few friends and founded the Women's Social and Political Union.
[00:17:35] Their motto was "Deeds, not words".
[00:17:40] The world came to know them as the suffragettes, and they took the fight for women's votes from polite drawing-room petitions to hunger strikes and prison cells.
[00:17:53] In fact, one of the first episodes we ever made was on the Suffragettes; it's episode number 36, if you'd like to listen to the full story.
[00:18:02] But in short, the suffragette movement can trace its roots back to Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst, who was arrested thirteen times. There is a statue of her in Manchester today, a few minutes' walk from St Peter's Field.
[00:18:20] Now, moving to the modern day, the factories have fallen silent. The last of the great mills closed in the second half of the twentieth century, and for a few decades Manchester looked like a city whose time had passed.
[00:18:38] But perhaps its time has come again.
[00:18:42] In July 2026, Andy Burnham, who had spent almost a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester, became Prime Minister.
[00:18:53] As mayor, he had argued that too much power sat in London, and not enough locally. Since becoming Prime Minister, he has opened Number 10 North, a Manchester office where he and his ministers work regularly.
[00:19:10] So two hundred years after Peterloo, when this city had no member of parliament at all, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has an office in Manchester.
[00:19:22] And its permanent home is planned for Great Ancoats Street, in the old factory district, which is where I’ll leave you today.
[00:19:31] Because if you Google "Ancoats" now, Google describes it as “a happening neighbourhood known for its eclectic food and drink scene. Scandinavian eateries, Japanese teahouses and Mexican restaurants, to name a few, sit alongside craft breweries and speakeasy-style bars.”
[00:19:52] So, by all means, if you find yourself in Manchester, go to Ancoats, enjoy the eclectic food and drink scene, but know that you are standing on the foundations of the world’s first great industrial city.
[00:20:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the second part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:20:18] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:22] Next up, in the third and final part, we'll be heading south-west, to Bristol. It's the story of the little ship that found North America, the merchants who grew rich on the slave trade, the campaigners who fought back, and the statue that ended up at the bottom of the harbour.
[00:20:41] If you'd like to go deeper into some of today's themes, we have an episode on the Industrial Revolution, which is episode number 150, one on the suffragettes, episode 36, and one on the divide between the north and south of England, which is episode 486.
[00:21:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
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In 1835, a visiting French aristocrat described Manchester as a filthy sewer from which pure gold flowed.
In part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain, we follow Manchester's explosive rise as the world's first industrial city, and the people who fought to make it a place fit to live in.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's time for part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:30] In part one, we saw how Edinburgh lost its parliament and then reinvented itself as the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:38] In part three, we'll finish in Bristol, the city that opened England's door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:00:49] But today, we are moving to the city where all those clever Scottish ideas about markets and machines turned into smoke, noise and money: Manchester, the first industrial city on Earth.
[00:01:05] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] When you first think of Manchester, perhaps a few things come to mind. If you're a football fan, you might think of its two clubs: Manchester United and Manchester City.
[00:01:25] If you're a music fan, you probably know that bands such as Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division and The Stone Roses are all from Manchester.
[00:01:37] It's somewhere between the fifth and the seventh largest city in the UK, depending on how you count it, but it packs a serious cultural punch.
[00:01:48] For most of its history, though, nobody outside the north of England had much reason to think about it at all. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, it became the most talked-about city on the planet.
[00:02:06] In the summer of 1835, a young French aristocrat stepped off a coach in Manchester.
[00:02:14] His name was Alexis de Tocqueville. He was touring Britain to understand the forces that were changing the world, and everyone had told him the same thing: you must see Manchester.
[00:02:32] What he found astonished him. Huge six-storey factories, wreathed in black smoke. Crowds of pale workers streaming through muddy streets. Palaces of industry standing next to some of the worst slums in Europe.
[00:02:53] He sat down and wrote one of the most famous descriptions of any city, ever. "From this foul drain," he wrote, "the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows."
[00:03:13] To understand how Manchester became that city, we need to go back to the 1770s.
[00:03:20] It was then a market town in the north-west of England, home to around twenty-five thousand people. It had no city walls, no cathedral status, no member of parliament, and no particular claim to fame beyond a busy trade in cloth.
[00:03:39] Then it exploded. By 1802 the population had reached around ninety-five thousand. By the census of 1851, it was over three hundred thousand.
[00:03:56] Nothing this fast had ever happened to a city before. There were no plans, no real building regulations, and no map that stayed accurate for more than a few years.
[00:04:09] What drove it all was cotton.
[00:04:14] Manchester, it turned out, had everything the new cotton industry needed. A damp climate that stopped the delicate threads from snapping. Coalfields nearby to power the mills. A port, Liverpool, just thirty miles away, bringing in raw cotton from across the Atlantic.
[00:04:36] And it had canals for easy, cheap transportation.
[00:04:40] In 1761, the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal to bring coal from his mines into the town, and the price of coal in Manchester roughly halved.
[00:04:52] Cheap coal meant cheap steam power.
[00:04:57] Then came the machines. Spinning machines that could do the work of a hundred human hands, powered first by water, then by steam.
[00:05:08] Manchester's genius was to put all of this together, on a scale nobody had attempted before. It became the first city in the world whose whole economy was built around steam-powered factories.
[00:05:24] In one district, Ancoats, mills of six, seven and eight storeys rose side by side along the canals.
[00:05:33] Ancoats is often called the world's first industrial suburb: a neighbourhood built for factories, not for people, though tens of thousands of people lived there all the same.
[00:05:47] By the second half of the century, Manchester and the mill towns around it were processing roughly a third of all the cotton grown on Earth. They called it Cottonopolis: the city of cotton.
[00:06:03] Cloth spun and woven here dressed people in Europe, Africa, India and the Americas. If you wore clothes made of cotton, there was a good chance they had been made, in part, in this great industrial city.
[00:06:19] Now, to give you a sense of what was actually happening in these cotton mills, if you were to step inside one, the first thing that would hit you was the noise.
[00:06:31] Hundreds of machines hammering away in one vast room, hour after hour. Many workers went partly deaf, and mill workers developed their own way of communicating: an exaggerated, silent mouthing of words, so they could lip-read one another over the roar.
[00:06:54] The air was kept hot and damp, because warm, moist air was better for the cotton thread. Temperatures inside could reach thirty degrees. The air was also thick with cotton dust, and these fine white fibres would be breathed in by workers, settle in their lungs and, over the years, slowly destroy them.
[00:07:21] The working day was twelve hours or more, six days a week.
[00:07:26] And the machines did not forgive mistakes. Fingers and hands would be lost in the machines. And if you were really unlucky, incidents could be fatal.
[00:07:39] And everywhere, there were children.
[00:07:43] Small children were prized in the mills because they were small. They worked as scavengers, crawling underneath the moving machinery to sweep up the loose cotton, while the machines thundered on above their heads. Some started at seven or eight years old, and of course they were just as likely to lose a finger, or even be killed if their clothes got caught in the works.
[00:08:11] Outside the factory gates, things weren't much better. Housing was thrown up as fast and cheaply as possible, and whole families lived in single damp cellar rooms.
[00:08:25] In the worst districts, one toilet might serve dozens of families, and drinking water came from rivers that ran black with dye and waste.
[00:08:38] In 1842, a government report put numbers on what this did to people. Among Manchester's labourers and their families, the average age at death was just seventeen.
[00:08:54] Now, this is dragged down by deaths in childhood, but it still gives you some idea.
[00:09:01] In the rural county of Rutland, the equivalent figure was thirty-eight, more than twice as high.
[00:09:09] Conditions were awful, and they were plain for anyone to see.
[00:09:15] In December 1842, a twenty-two-year-old German arrived in the city.
[00:09:22] His father was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and had sent him to work in the office of the family firm, partly to knock some radical political ideas out of the young man's head.
[00:09:36] His time in Manchester had precisely the opposite effect.
[00:09:42] His name was Friedrich Engels.
[00:09:46] By day, he worked as a respectable clerk in the family business, shaking hands with mill owners and merchants.
[00:09:55] In his free time, he walked the slums, taking notes on everything he saw.
[00:10:01] The result was a book which he published in 1845 with the title The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a furious, very detailed catalogue of how Manchester's workers lived and died.
[00:10:19] Engels sent his findings to a friend of his, another German thinker, called Karl Marx.
[00:10:27] And as you may know, three years later the two men would put their thoughts together, with the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
[00:10:38] Modern communism, in other words, has Manchester deep in its roots. Long before any revolution in Russia, its raw material was gathered in the slums beside the mills.
[00:10:51] Now, the people of Manchester did not need a German philosopher to tell them something was wrong. It was clear to see, and they had been saying it themselves for decades.
[00:11:03] And they had been trying to do something about it.
[00:11:07] See, for most of this period of explosive growth, this world-famous city of hundreds of thousands of people had not a single member of parliament of its own.
[00:11:19] Ordinary working people could not vote at all. So when bad harvests and high bread prices meant they went hungry, they had no legal way to change anything.
[00:11:33] So they organised. And on the 16th of August 1819, on an open space in the centre of town called St Peter's Field, they held the largest political meeting Britain had ever seen.
[00:11:51] Tens of thousands of men, women and children walked in from the mill towns, dressed in their Sunday best, their best clothes.
[00:12:01] They carried banners demanding the vote, and poles topped with red caps, the old symbol of liberty. The mood, witnesses said, was closer to a festival than a protest.
[00:12:15] They had come to listen to Henry Hunt, the most famous radical speaker in the country, a man known for his white top hat and his booming voice.
[00:12:27] The local magistrates were watching from a house at the edge of the field, and they saw it all very differently.
[00:12:36] To them, this looked like the beginning of a revolution. They ordered Hunt's arrest, and they sent in cavalry to carry it out.
[00:12:47] Some of the horsemen were local businessmen in uniform, and some of them had been drinking heavily. They drew their sabres, their curved cavalry swords, and rode into the densely packed crowd.
[00:13:03] The first victim never even reached the meeting. A two-year-old boy was knocked out of his mother's arms by a galloping horse on a nearby street, minutes before the charge began, and died.
[00:13:16] In the field itself, people had nowhere to run. Around eighteen died, cut down by the horsemen's swords or trampled under the horses' hooves.
[00:13:29] Several hundred more were injured. And many of the injured hid their wounds afterwards, terrified of losing their jobs if their employers learnt they had been at the meeting.
[00:13:43] Within days, a radical Manchester newspaper had given the event the name that stuck: Peterloo. St Peter's Field plus Waterloo, which was a dark joke at the expense of an army that had turned its swords on its own people.
[00:14:00] Peterloo shocked the country. The government's response was not to apologise, but to send the magistrates a letter of thanks.
[00:14:12] The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre, and its consequences ran deep.
[00:14:20] A young Manchester cotton merchant named John Edward Taylor, who had witnessed the massacre, decided the city needed an honest newspaper.
[00:14:30] In 1821, he founded the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps you've read it, albeit under its modern name, simply The Guardian. It's one of the most read newspapers in the world, and has a strong centre-left, workers-first worldview.
[00:14:49] After the massacre, little by little, it seemed like the government started to listen.
[00:14:57] In 1832, a great reform of parliament finally gave Manchester its own MPs. The vote for ordinary working people took far longer, another century of campaigning, but this wasn't unique to Manchester.
[00:15:13] Now, moving forward a few decades, in the 1860s, the cotton industry faced a crisis.
[00:15:22] In 1861, a civil war broke out in the United States, and the North blockaded the ports of the slave-owning South.
[00:15:33] After all, all that raw cotton had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was the plantations of the Americas, picked by slaves whose working conditions made those of the Manchester factory workers look positively Scandinavian.
[00:15:51] But in 1861, the raw cotton stopped coming.
[00:15:57] The result in Lancashire was known as the Cotton Famine. Mills closed by the hundred, and mill workers and their families went hungry.
[00:16:08] For these workers, a British deal with the South would have meant the cotton flowing again, the mills reopening, and bread on the table.
[00:16:18] Yet the workers gathered at a great public meeting and declared their support for the North, for President Lincoln, and for the end of slavery.
[00:16:31] Lincoln was moved enough to write back, addressing his letter not to the Queen or to any official, but to the working men of Manchester.
[00:16:43] He called their stance an act of heroism that had not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
[00:16:51] Their own children were going hungry because of the blockade.
[00:16:55] Yet they looked at the enslaved people on the other side of the ocean, the people who grew the cotton they spun, and took their side.
[00:17:06] There is a statue of Lincoln in Manchester to this day, with words from that letter carved beneath it.
[00:17:14] Now, moving forward another forty years or so, I must tell you about another thing Manchester is famous for. In 1903, a Manchester widow called Emmeline Pankhurst sat down with her daughters and a few friends and founded the Women's Social and Political Union.
[00:17:35] Their motto was "Deeds, not words".
[00:17:40] The world came to know them as the suffragettes, and they took the fight for women's votes from polite drawing-room petitions to hunger strikes and prison cells.
[00:17:53] In fact, one of the first episodes we ever made was on the Suffragettes; it's episode number 36, if you'd like to listen to the full story.
[00:18:02] But in short, the suffragette movement can trace its roots back to Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst, who was arrested thirteen times. There is a statue of her in Manchester today, a few minutes' walk from St Peter's Field.
[00:18:20] Now, moving to the modern day, the factories have fallen silent. The last of the great mills closed in the second half of the twentieth century, and for a few decades Manchester looked like a city whose time had passed.
[00:18:38] But perhaps its time has come again.
[00:18:42] In July 2026, Andy Burnham, who had spent almost a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester, became Prime Minister.
[00:18:53] As mayor, he had argued that too much power sat in London, and not enough locally. Since becoming Prime Minister, he has opened Number 10 North, a Manchester office where he and his ministers work regularly.
[00:19:10] So two hundred years after Peterloo, when this city had no member of parliament at all, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has an office in Manchester.
[00:19:22] And its permanent home is planned for Great Ancoats Street, in the old factory district, which is where I’ll leave you today.
[00:19:31] Because if you Google "Ancoats" now, Google describes it as “a happening neighbourhood known for its eclectic food and drink scene. Scandinavian eateries, Japanese teahouses and Mexican restaurants, to name a few, sit alongside craft breweries and speakeasy-style bars.”
[00:19:52] So, by all means, if you find yourself in Manchester, go to Ancoats, enjoy the eclectic food and drink scene, but know that you are standing on the foundations of the world’s first great industrial city.
[00:20:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the second part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:20:18] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:22] Next up, in the third and final part, we'll be heading south-west, to Bristol. It's the story of the little ship that found North America, the merchants who grew rich on the slave trade, the campaigners who fought back, and the statue that ended up at the bottom of the harbour.
[00:20:41] If you'd like to go deeper into some of today's themes, we have an episode on the Industrial Revolution, which is episode number 150, one on the suffragettes, episode 36, and one on the divide between the north and south of England, which is episode 486.
[00:21:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's time for part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:30] In part one, we saw how Edinburgh lost its parliament and then reinvented itself as the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:38] In part three, we'll finish in Bristol, the city that opened England's door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:00:49] But today, we are moving to the city where all those clever Scottish ideas about markets and machines turned into smoke, noise and money: Manchester, the first industrial city on Earth.
[00:01:05] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] When you first think of Manchester, perhaps a few things come to mind. If you're a football fan, you might think of its two clubs: Manchester United and Manchester City.
[00:01:25] If you're a music fan, you probably know that bands such as Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division and The Stone Roses are all from Manchester.
[00:01:37] It's somewhere between the fifth and the seventh largest city in the UK, depending on how you count it, but it packs a serious cultural punch.
[00:01:48] For most of its history, though, nobody outside the north of England had much reason to think about it at all. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, it became the most talked-about city on the planet.
[00:02:06] In the summer of 1835, a young French aristocrat stepped off a coach in Manchester.
[00:02:14] His name was Alexis de Tocqueville. He was touring Britain to understand the forces that were changing the world, and everyone had told him the same thing: you must see Manchester.
[00:02:32] What he found astonished him. Huge six-storey factories, wreathed in black smoke. Crowds of pale workers streaming through muddy streets. Palaces of industry standing next to some of the worst slums in Europe.
[00:02:53] He sat down and wrote one of the most famous descriptions of any city, ever. "From this foul drain," he wrote, "the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows."
[00:03:13] To understand how Manchester became that city, we need to go back to the 1770s.
[00:03:20] It was then a market town in the north-west of England, home to around twenty-five thousand people. It had no city walls, no cathedral status, no member of parliament, and no particular claim to fame beyond a busy trade in cloth.
[00:03:39] Then it exploded. By 1802 the population had reached around ninety-five thousand. By the census of 1851, it was over three hundred thousand.
[00:03:56] Nothing this fast had ever happened to a city before. There were no plans, no real building regulations, and no map that stayed accurate for more than a few years.
[00:04:09] What drove it all was cotton.
[00:04:14] Manchester, it turned out, had everything the new cotton industry needed. A damp climate that stopped the delicate threads from snapping. Coalfields nearby to power the mills. A port, Liverpool, just thirty miles away, bringing in raw cotton from across the Atlantic.
[00:04:36] And it had canals for easy, cheap transportation.
[00:04:40] In 1761, the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal to bring coal from his mines into the town, and the price of coal in Manchester roughly halved.
[00:04:52] Cheap coal meant cheap steam power.
[00:04:57] Then came the machines. Spinning machines that could do the work of a hundred human hands, powered first by water, then by steam.
[00:05:08] Manchester's genius was to put all of this together, on a scale nobody had attempted before. It became the first city in the world whose whole economy was built around steam-powered factories.
[00:05:24] In one district, Ancoats, mills of six, seven and eight storeys rose side by side along the canals.
[00:05:33] Ancoats is often called the world's first industrial suburb: a neighbourhood built for factories, not for people, though tens of thousands of people lived there all the same.
[00:05:47] By the second half of the century, Manchester and the mill towns around it were processing roughly a third of all the cotton grown on Earth. They called it Cottonopolis: the city of cotton.
[00:06:03] Cloth spun and woven here dressed people in Europe, Africa, India and the Americas. If you wore clothes made of cotton, there was a good chance they had been made, in part, in this great industrial city.
[00:06:19] Now, to give you a sense of what was actually happening in these cotton mills, if you were to step inside one, the first thing that would hit you was the noise.
[00:06:31] Hundreds of machines hammering away in one vast room, hour after hour. Many workers went partly deaf, and mill workers developed their own way of communicating: an exaggerated, silent mouthing of words, so they could lip-read one another over the roar.
[00:06:54] The air was kept hot and damp, because warm, moist air was better for the cotton thread. Temperatures inside could reach thirty degrees. The air was also thick with cotton dust, and these fine white fibres would be breathed in by workers, settle in their lungs and, over the years, slowly destroy them.
[00:07:21] The working day was twelve hours or more, six days a week.
[00:07:26] And the machines did not forgive mistakes. Fingers and hands would be lost in the machines. And if you were really unlucky, incidents could be fatal.
[00:07:39] And everywhere, there were children.
[00:07:43] Small children were prized in the mills because they were small. They worked as scavengers, crawling underneath the moving machinery to sweep up the loose cotton, while the machines thundered on above their heads. Some started at seven or eight years old, and of course they were just as likely to lose a finger, or even be killed if their clothes got caught in the works.
[00:08:11] Outside the factory gates, things weren't much better. Housing was thrown up as fast and cheaply as possible, and whole families lived in single damp cellar rooms.
[00:08:25] In the worst districts, one toilet might serve dozens of families, and drinking water came from rivers that ran black with dye and waste.
[00:08:38] In 1842, a government report put numbers on what this did to people. Among Manchester's labourers and their families, the average age at death was just seventeen.
[00:08:54] Now, this is dragged down by deaths in childhood, but it still gives you some idea.
[00:09:01] In the rural county of Rutland, the equivalent figure was thirty-eight, more than twice as high.
[00:09:09] Conditions were awful, and they were plain for anyone to see.
[00:09:15] In December 1842, a twenty-two-year-old German arrived in the city.
[00:09:22] His father was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and had sent him to work in the office of the family firm, partly to knock some radical political ideas out of the young man's head.
[00:09:36] His time in Manchester had precisely the opposite effect.
[00:09:42] His name was Friedrich Engels.
[00:09:46] By day, he worked as a respectable clerk in the family business, shaking hands with mill owners and merchants.
[00:09:55] In his free time, he walked the slums, taking notes on everything he saw.
[00:10:01] The result was a book which he published in 1845 with the title The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a furious, very detailed catalogue of how Manchester's workers lived and died.
[00:10:19] Engels sent his findings to a friend of his, another German thinker, called Karl Marx.
[00:10:27] And as you may know, three years later the two men would put their thoughts together, with the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
[00:10:38] Modern communism, in other words, has Manchester deep in its roots. Long before any revolution in Russia, its raw material was gathered in the slums beside the mills.
[00:10:51] Now, the people of Manchester did not need a German philosopher to tell them something was wrong. It was clear to see, and they had been saying it themselves for decades.
[00:11:03] And they had been trying to do something about it.
[00:11:07] See, for most of this period of explosive growth, this world-famous city of hundreds of thousands of people had not a single member of parliament of its own.
[00:11:19] Ordinary working people could not vote at all. So when bad harvests and high bread prices meant they went hungry, they had no legal way to change anything.
[00:11:33] So they organised. And on the 16th of August 1819, on an open space in the centre of town called St Peter's Field, they held the largest political meeting Britain had ever seen.
[00:11:51] Tens of thousands of men, women and children walked in from the mill towns, dressed in their Sunday best, their best clothes.
[00:12:01] They carried banners demanding the vote, and poles topped with red caps, the old symbol of liberty. The mood, witnesses said, was closer to a festival than a protest.
[00:12:15] They had come to listen to Henry Hunt, the most famous radical speaker in the country, a man known for his white top hat and his booming voice.
[00:12:27] The local magistrates were watching from a house at the edge of the field, and they saw it all very differently.
[00:12:36] To them, this looked like the beginning of a revolution. They ordered Hunt's arrest, and they sent in cavalry to carry it out.
[00:12:47] Some of the horsemen were local businessmen in uniform, and some of them had been drinking heavily. They drew their sabres, their curved cavalry swords, and rode into the densely packed crowd.
[00:13:03] The first victim never even reached the meeting. A two-year-old boy was knocked out of his mother's arms by a galloping horse on a nearby street, minutes before the charge began, and died.
[00:13:16] In the field itself, people had nowhere to run. Around eighteen died, cut down by the horsemen's swords or trampled under the horses' hooves.
[00:13:29] Several hundred more were injured. And many of the injured hid their wounds afterwards, terrified of losing their jobs if their employers learnt they had been at the meeting.
[00:13:43] Within days, a radical Manchester newspaper had given the event the name that stuck: Peterloo. St Peter's Field plus Waterloo, which was a dark joke at the expense of an army that had turned its swords on its own people.
[00:14:00] Peterloo shocked the country. The government's response was not to apologise, but to send the magistrates a letter of thanks.
[00:14:12] The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre, and its consequences ran deep.
[00:14:20] A young Manchester cotton merchant named John Edward Taylor, who had witnessed the massacre, decided the city needed an honest newspaper.
[00:14:30] In 1821, he founded the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps you've read it, albeit under its modern name, simply The Guardian. It's one of the most read newspapers in the world, and has a strong centre-left, workers-first worldview.
[00:14:49] After the massacre, little by little, it seemed like the government started to listen.
[00:14:57] In 1832, a great reform of parliament finally gave Manchester its own MPs. The vote for ordinary working people took far longer, another century of campaigning, but this wasn't unique to Manchester.
[00:15:13] Now, moving forward a few decades, in the 1860s, the cotton industry faced a crisis.
[00:15:22] In 1861, a civil war broke out in the United States, and the North blockaded the ports of the slave-owning South.
[00:15:33] After all, all that raw cotton had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was the plantations of the Americas, picked by slaves whose working conditions made those of the Manchester factory workers look positively Scandinavian.
[00:15:51] But in 1861, the raw cotton stopped coming.
[00:15:57] The result in Lancashire was known as the Cotton Famine. Mills closed by the hundred, and mill workers and their families went hungry.
[00:16:08] For these workers, a British deal with the South would have meant the cotton flowing again, the mills reopening, and bread on the table.
[00:16:18] Yet the workers gathered at a great public meeting and declared their support for the North, for President Lincoln, and for the end of slavery.
[00:16:31] Lincoln was moved enough to write back, addressing his letter not to the Queen or to any official, but to the working men of Manchester.
[00:16:43] He called their stance an act of heroism that had not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
[00:16:51] Their own children were going hungry because of the blockade.
[00:16:55] Yet they looked at the enslaved people on the other side of the ocean, the people who grew the cotton they spun, and took their side.
[00:17:06] There is a statue of Lincoln in Manchester to this day, with words from that letter carved beneath it.
[00:17:14] Now, moving forward another forty years or so, I must tell you about another thing Manchester is famous for. In 1903, a Manchester widow called Emmeline Pankhurst sat down with her daughters and a few friends and founded the Women's Social and Political Union.
[00:17:35] Their motto was "Deeds, not words".
[00:17:40] The world came to know them as the suffragettes, and they took the fight for women's votes from polite drawing-room petitions to hunger strikes and prison cells.
[00:17:53] In fact, one of the first episodes we ever made was on the Suffragettes; it's episode number 36, if you'd like to listen to the full story.
[00:18:02] But in short, the suffragette movement can trace its roots back to Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst, who was arrested thirteen times. There is a statue of her in Manchester today, a few minutes' walk from St Peter's Field.
[00:18:20] Now, moving to the modern day, the factories have fallen silent. The last of the great mills closed in the second half of the twentieth century, and for a few decades Manchester looked like a city whose time had passed.
[00:18:38] But perhaps its time has come again.
[00:18:42] In July 2026, Andy Burnham, who had spent almost a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester, became Prime Minister.
[00:18:53] As mayor, he had argued that too much power sat in London, and not enough locally. Since becoming Prime Minister, he has opened Number 10 North, a Manchester office where he and his ministers work regularly.
[00:19:10] So two hundred years after Peterloo, when this city had no member of parliament at all, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has an office in Manchester.
[00:19:22] And its permanent home is planned for Great Ancoats Street, in the old factory district, which is where I’ll leave you today.
[00:19:31] Because if you Google "Ancoats" now, Google describes it as “a happening neighbourhood known for its eclectic food and drink scene. Scandinavian eateries, Japanese teahouses and Mexican restaurants, to name a few, sit alongside craft breweries and speakeasy-style bars.”
[00:19:52] So, by all means, if you find yourself in Manchester, go to Ancoats, enjoy the eclectic food and drink scene, but know that you are standing on the foundations of the world’s first great industrial city.
[00:20:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the second part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:20:18] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:22] Next up, in the third and final part, we'll be heading south-west, to Bristol. It's the story of the little ship that found North America, the merchants who grew rich on the slave trade, the campaigners who fought back, and the statue that ended up at the bottom of the harbour.
[00:20:41] If you'd like to go deeper into some of today's themes, we have an episode on the Industrial Revolution, which is episode number 150, one on the suffragettes, episode 36, and one on the divide between the north and south of England, which is episode 486.
[00:21:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's time for part two of our mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:30] In part one, we saw how Edinburgh lost its parliament and then reinvented itself as the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:38] In part three, we'll finish in Bristol, the city that opened England's door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:00:49] But today, we are moving to the city where all those clever Scottish ideas about markets and machines turned into smoke, noise and money: Manchester, the first industrial city on Earth.
[00:01:05] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:11] When you first think of Manchester, perhaps a few things come to mind. If you're a football fan, you might think of its two clubs: Manchester United and Manchester City.
[00:01:25] If you're a music fan, you probably know that bands such as Oasis, The Smiths, Joy Division and The Stone Roses are all from Manchester.
[00:01:37] It's somewhere between the fifth and the seventh largest city in the UK, depending on how you count it, but it packs a serious cultural punch.
[00:01:48] For most of its history, though, nobody outside the north of England had much reason to think about it at all. Then, in the space of a single lifetime, it became the most talked-about city on the planet.
[00:02:06] In the summer of 1835, a young French aristocrat stepped off a coach in Manchester.
[00:02:14] His name was Alexis de Tocqueville. He was touring Britain to understand the forces that were changing the world, and everyone had told him the same thing: you must see Manchester.
[00:02:32] What he found astonished him. Huge six-storey factories, wreathed in black smoke. Crowds of pale workers streaming through muddy streets. Palaces of industry standing next to some of the worst slums in Europe.
[00:02:53] He sat down and wrote one of the most famous descriptions of any city, ever. "From this foul drain," he wrote, "the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows."
[00:03:13] To understand how Manchester became that city, we need to go back to the 1770s.
[00:03:20] It was then a market town in the north-west of England, home to around twenty-five thousand people. It had no city walls, no cathedral status, no member of parliament, and no particular claim to fame beyond a busy trade in cloth.
[00:03:39] Then it exploded. By 1802 the population had reached around ninety-five thousand. By the census of 1851, it was over three hundred thousand.
[00:03:56] Nothing this fast had ever happened to a city before. There were no plans, no real building regulations, and no map that stayed accurate for more than a few years.
[00:04:09] What drove it all was cotton.
[00:04:14] Manchester, it turned out, had everything the new cotton industry needed. A damp climate that stopped the delicate threads from snapping. Coalfields nearby to power the mills. A port, Liverpool, just thirty miles away, bringing in raw cotton from across the Atlantic.
[00:04:36] And it had canals for easy, cheap transportation.
[00:04:40] In 1761, the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal to bring coal from his mines into the town, and the price of coal in Manchester roughly halved.
[00:04:52] Cheap coal meant cheap steam power.
[00:04:57] Then came the machines. Spinning machines that could do the work of a hundred human hands, powered first by water, then by steam.
[00:05:08] Manchester's genius was to put all of this together, on a scale nobody had attempted before. It became the first city in the world whose whole economy was built around steam-powered factories.
[00:05:24] In one district, Ancoats, mills of six, seven and eight storeys rose side by side along the canals.
[00:05:33] Ancoats is often called the world's first industrial suburb: a neighbourhood built for factories, not for people, though tens of thousands of people lived there all the same.
[00:05:47] By the second half of the century, Manchester and the mill towns around it were processing roughly a third of all the cotton grown on Earth. They called it Cottonopolis: the city of cotton.
[00:06:03] Cloth spun and woven here dressed people in Europe, Africa, India and the Americas. If you wore clothes made of cotton, there was a good chance they had been made, in part, in this great industrial city.
[00:06:19] Now, to give you a sense of what was actually happening in these cotton mills, if you were to step inside one, the first thing that would hit you was the noise.
[00:06:31] Hundreds of machines hammering away in one vast room, hour after hour. Many workers went partly deaf, and mill workers developed their own way of communicating: an exaggerated, silent mouthing of words, so they could lip-read one another over the roar.
[00:06:54] The air was kept hot and damp, because warm, moist air was better for the cotton thread. Temperatures inside could reach thirty degrees. The air was also thick with cotton dust, and these fine white fibres would be breathed in by workers, settle in their lungs and, over the years, slowly destroy them.
[00:07:21] The working day was twelve hours or more, six days a week.
[00:07:26] And the machines did not forgive mistakes. Fingers and hands would be lost in the machines. And if you were really unlucky, incidents could be fatal.
[00:07:39] And everywhere, there were children.
[00:07:43] Small children were prized in the mills because they were small. They worked as scavengers, crawling underneath the moving machinery to sweep up the loose cotton, while the machines thundered on above their heads. Some started at seven or eight years old, and of course they were just as likely to lose a finger, or even be killed if their clothes got caught in the works.
[00:08:11] Outside the factory gates, things weren't much better. Housing was thrown up as fast and cheaply as possible, and whole families lived in single damp cellar rooms.
[00:08:25] In the worst districts, one toilet might serve dozens of families, and drinking water came from rivers that ran black with dye and waste.
[00:08:38] In 1842, a government report put numbers on what this did to people. Among Manchester's labourers and their families, the average age at death was just seventeen.
[00:08:54] Now, this is dragged down by deaths in childhood, but it still gives you some idea.
[00:09:01] In the rural county of Rutland, the equivalent figure was thirty-eight, more than twice as high.
[00:09:09] Conditions were awful, and they were plain for anyone to see.
[00:09:15] In December 1842, a twenty-two-year-old German arrived in the city.
[00:09:22] His father was a wealthy cotton manufacturer and had sent him to work in the office of the family firm, partly to knock some radical political ideas out of the young man's head.
[00:09:36] His time in Manchester had precisely the opposite effect.
[00:09:42] His name was Friedrich Engels.
[00:09:46] By day, he worked as a respectable clerk in the family business, shaking hands with mill owners and merchants.
[00:09:55] In his free time, he walked the slums, taking notes on everything he saw.
[00:10:01] The result was a book which he published in 1845 with the title The Condition of the Working Class in England. It was a furious, very detailed catalogue of how Manchester's workers lived and died.
[00:10:19] Engels sent his findings to a friend of his, another German thinker, called Karl Marx.
[00:10:27] And as you may know, three years later the two men would put their thoughts together, with the publication of The Communist Manifesto.
[00:10:38] Modern communism, in other words, has Manchester deep in its roots. Long before any revolution in Russia, its raw material was gathered in the slums beside the mills.
[00:10:51] Now, the people of Manchester did not need a German philosopher to tell them something was wrong. It was clear to see, and they had been saying it themselves for decades.
[00:11:03] And they had been trying to do something about it.
[00:11:07] See, for most of this period of explosive growth, this world-famous city of hundreds of thousands of people had not a single member of parliament of its own.
[00:11:19] Ordinary working people could not vote at all. So when bad harvests and high bread prices meant they went hungry, they had no legal way to change anything.
[00:11:33] So they organised. And on the 16th of August 1819, on an open space in the centre of town called St Peter's Field, they held the largest political meeting Britain had ever seen.
[00:11:51] Tens of thousands of men, women and children walked in from the mill towns, dressed in their Sunday best, their best clothes.
[00:12:01] They carried banners demanding the vote, and poles topped with red caps, the old symbol of liberty. The mood, witnesses said, was closer to a festival than a protest.
[00:12:15] They had come to listen to Henry Hunt, the most famous radical speaker in the country, a man known for his white top hat and his booming voice.
[00:12:27] The local magistrates were watching from a house at the edge of the field, and they saw it all very differently.
[00:12:36] To them, this looked like the beginning of a revolution. They ordered Hunt's arrest, and they sent in cavalry to carry it out.
[00:12:47] Some of the horsemen were local businessmen in uniform, and some of them had been drinking heavily. They drew their sabres, their curved cavalry swords, and rode into the densely packed crowd.
[00:13:03] The first victim never even reached the meeting. A two-year-old boy was knocked out of his mother's arms by a galloping horse on a nearby street, minutes before the charge began, and died.
[00:13:16] In the field itself, people had nowhere to run. Around eighteen died, cut down by the horsemen's swords or trampled under the horses' hooves.
[00:13:29] Several hundred more were injured. And many of the injured hid their wounds afterwards, terrified of losing their jobs if their employers learnt they had been at the meeting.
[00:13:43] Within days, a radical Manchester newspaper had given the event the name that stuck: Peterloo. St Peter's Field plus Waterloo, which was a dark joke at the expense of an army that had turned its swords on its own people.
[00:14:00] Peterloo shocked the country. The government's response was not to apologise, but to send the magistrates a letter of thanks.
[00:14:12] The event became known as the Peterloo Massacre, and its consequences ran deep.
[00:14:20] A young Manchester cotton merchant named John Edward Taylor, who had witnessed the massacre, decided the city needed an honest newspaper.
[00:14:30] In 1821, he founded the Manchester Guardian. Perhaps you've read it, albeit under its modern name, simply The Guardian. It's one of the most read newspapers in the world, and has a strong centre-left, workers-first worldview.
[00:14:49] After the massacre, little by little, it seemed like the government started to listen.
[00:14:57] In 1832, a great reform of parliament finally gave Manchester its own MPs. The vote for ordinary working people took far longer, another century of campaigning, but this wasn't unique to Manchester.
[00:15:13] Now, moving forward a few decades, in the 1860s, the cotton industry faced a crisis.
[00:15:22] In 1861, a civil war broke out in the United States, and the North blockaded the ports of the slave-owning South.
[00:15:33] After all, all that raw cotton had to come from somewhere. And that somewhere was the plantations of the Americas, picked by slaves whose working conditions made those of the Manchester factory workers look positively Scandinavian.
[00:15:51] But in 1861, the raw cotton stopped coming.
[00:15:57] The result in Lancashire was known as the Cotton Famine. Mills closed by the hundred, and mill workers and their families went hungry.
[00:16:08] For these workers, a British deal with the South would have meant the cotton flowing again, the mills reopening, and bread on the table.
[00:16:18] Yet the workers gathered at a great public meeting and declared their support for the North, for President Lincoln, and for the end of slavery.
[00:16:31] Lincoln was moved enough to write back, addressing his letter not to the Queen or to any official, but to the working men of Manchester.
[00:16:43] He called their stance an act of heroism that had not been surpassed in any age or in any country.
[00:16:51] Their own children were going hungry because of the blockade.
[00:16:55] Yet they looked at the enslaved people on the other side of the ocean, the people who grew the cotton they spun, and took their side.
[00:17:06] There is a statue of Lincoln in Manchester to this day, with words from that letter carved beneath it.
[00:17:14] Now, moving forward another forty years or so, I must tell you about another thing Manchester is famous for. In 1903, a Manchester widow called Emmeline Pankhurst sat down with her daughters and a few friends and founded the Women's Social and Political Union.
[00:17:35] Their motto was "Deeds, not words".
[00:17:40] The world came to know them as the suffragettes, and they took the fight for women's votes from polite drawing-room petitions to hunger strikes and prison cells.
[00:17:53] In fact, one of the first episodes we ever made was on the Suffragettes; it's episode number 36, if you'd like to listen to the full story.
[00:18:02] But in short, the suffragette movement can trace its roots back to Manchester, to Emmeline Pankhurst, who was arrested thirteen times. There is a statue of her in Manchester today, a few minutes' walk from St Peter's Field.
[00:18:20] Now, moving to the modern day, the factories have fallen silent. The last of the great mills closed in the second half of the twentieth century, and for a few decades Manchester looked like a city whose time had passed.
[00:18:38] But perhaps its time has come again.
[00:18:42] In July 2026, Andy Burnham, who had spent almost a decade as mayor of Greater Manchester, became Prime Minister.
[00:18:53] As mayor, he had argued that too much power sat in London, and not enough locally. Since becoming Prime Minister, he has opened Number 10 North, a Manchester office where he and his ministers work regularly.
[00:19:10] So two hundred years after Peterloo, when this city had no member of parliament at all, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom has an office in Manchester.
[00:19:22] And its permanent home is planned for Great Ancoats Street, in the old factory district, which is where I’ll leave you today.
[00:19:31] Because if you Google "Ancoats" now, Google describes it as “a happening neighbourhood known for its eclectic food and drink scene. Scandinavian eateries, Japanese teahouses and Mexican restaurants, to name a few, sit alongside craft breweries and speakeasy-style bars.”
[00:19:52] So, by all means, if you find yourself in Manchester, go to Ancoats, enjoy the eclectic food and drink scene, but know that you are standing on the foundations of the world’s first great industrial city.
[00:20:09] OK, then, that is it for today's episode, the second part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:20:18] I hope it's been an interesting one and that you've learnt something new.
[00:20:22] Next up, in the third and final part, we'll be heading south-west, to Bristol. It's the story of the little ship that found North America, the merchants who grew rich on the slave trade, the campaigners who fought back, and the statue that ended up at the bottom of the harbour.
[00:20:41] If you'd like to go deeper into some of today's themes, we have an episode on the Industrial Revolution, which is episode number 150, one on the suffragettes, episode 36, and one on the divide between the north and south of England, which is episode 486.
[00:21:01] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:21:06] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
