In the city of Manchester, region of northwestern England

 Manchester has a long history of pushing boundaries, and its ingenuity is on the rise once again with new arts venues and creative programming. The one-time engine room of the Industrial Revolution is now driven by invention, discovery, and progress.

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(in the Manchester region of northwestern England) Manchester, the birthplace of the world-famous, hedonistic Haçienda, is now home to Parklife Festival and the Warehouse Project. Most of the city, including the historic core, is in the historic county of Lancashire, but it includes an area south of the Mersey River in the historic county of Cheshire. Manchester is the nucleus of the largest metropolitan area in the north of England, and it remains an important regional city. (Today, the city is famous for its two top Premier League football clubs, Manchester United and Manchester City.)

+ In many respects Manchester could claim to be the first of the new generation of huge industrial cities created in the Western world during the past 250 years. In 1717 it was a market town of 10,000 people, but by 1851 it had become a manufacturing and commercial city of more than 300,000 inhabitants, already spilling out its suburbs and absorbing its industrial satellites. By the beginning of the 20th century, salients of urban growth linked Manchester to the ring of cotton-manufacturing towns -- Bolton, Rochdale, and Oldham, for example -- that almost surround the city (and a new form of urban development, a conurbation, was evolving).

+ Manchester lies at a height of 40 meters above sea level, enclosed by the slopes of the Pennine range on the east and the upland spur of Rossendale on the north. Within this physical unit Manchester, the central city, is situated on the east bank of the Irwell River and has an elongated north-south extent. In 1930 the city extended its boundaries far to the south beyond the Mersey, to annex 9 square miles (23 square km) of the northern portion of the former administrative county of Cheshire. Two large metropolitan boroughs adjoin the city of Manchester on the west and southwest: Salford and Trafford. Together the three administrative units form the main concentration of commercial employment, from which suburbs have spread far to the west and south. To the north and east of Manchester, smaller industrial towns and villages extend as a continuous urban area to the foot of the encircling upland.

+ Manchester’s 19th-century wealth left a permanent record in an architectural variety and virtuosity that makes the city center an outdoor museum of styles from Greek classical to early tall steel-framed structures. Commercial firms vied to commission the best architects to design offices and warehouses of ornate splendor, and the public buildings were intended to outshine London’s. Thus, banks occupied Greek temples or turreted Gothic castles, and warehouses were given the facades of Venetian palaces. The Town Hall is regarded as perhaps the ultimate in Victorian Gothic fantasies.