Manchester

Manchester is a city in northwest England, on the River Irwell below the western slopes of the Pennines. Its symbol is the worker bee, chosen in the 19th century for the hard work of its cotton mills. Two football clubs carry its name: Manchester City, at the Etihad Stadium in the east of the city, and Manchester United, at Old Trafford just outside its boundary.

The Romans built a fort called Mamucium on a sandstone bluff in the 1st century. Cotton spinning in steam-powered mills turned the market town into the first industrial city in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and the Bridgewater Canal brought coal to it from the 1760s. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first intercity passenger railway, opened in 1830, and the town received city status in 1853. Ernest Rutherford split the atom at the University of Manchester in the 1910s, and the first stored-program computer ran there in the 1940s. The Manchester Ship Canal of the 1890s made the inland city a seaport.

The Co-operative Group, which grew from the cooperative movement of the 19th century, runs its food stores, funeral homes and insurance from its headquarters at One Angel Square. Boohoo sells low-priced fashion online from its base in the city, and THG runs the Myprotein brand of sports nutrition from Manchester.

The John Rylands Library, a neo-Gothic building of red sandstone opened at the turn of the 20th century, holds medieval manuscripts and an early fragment of the Gospel of John. The Science and Industry Museum occupies the oldest surviving passenger railway station in the world, the terminus of the Liverpool line. The main building of the University of Manchester on Oxford Road is a Victorian Gothic quadrangle designed by Alfred Waterhouse.