Overview
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. The City of Manchester metropolitan borough has a population of 441,200. Manchester lies at the centre of the wider Greater Manchester Urban Area which has a population of 2,240,230, the United Kingdom's third largest conurbation.

Forming part of the English Core Cities Group, and often described as the "Capital of the North", Manchester today is a centre of the arts, the media, higher education and commerce. It is also regarded as the third best place to locate business in the UK, is the third most visited city in the United Kingdom by foreign visitors and now often considered to be the Second city of the United Kingdom. Manchester is also well known for its sporting connections, with two Premier League football teams, Manchester United and Manchester City, and hosted the XVII Commonwealth Games in 2002.

It is claimed that Manchester was the world's first industrialised city and is notable for the central role it played during the Industrial Revolution. It was the dominant international centre of textile manufacture and cotton spinning. During the 19th century it was nicknamed Cottonopolis, denoting that the area was a metropolis of cotton mills. Manchester City Centre is now on a "tentative list" of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, mainly due to its network of canals and mills that facilitated its development during the 19th century.

History
There are few signs of prehistoric occupation of the city. The only major Bronze age find is at the far south of the city, where the remains of an extensive farming community overlooking the River Bollin were found during the construction of the second runway of the airport.

Central Manchester has been settled since at least Roman times. The Roman general Gnaeus Julius Agricola constructed a fort in the 70s AD on a defensible hill where the River Medlock meets the River Irwell, at the junction of roads to Chester, York, Buxton, Ribchester, and Melandra. A stabilised fragment of foundations of the final version of the fort is visible in Castlefield. The Romans withdrew in the early fifth century, and by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 the focus of settlement had shifted to the confluence of the rivers Irwell and Irk. Much of the wider area was laid waste in the subsequent Harrying of the North.

Thomas de la Warre, lord of the manor, founded and constructed a collegiate church for the parish in 1421. The church is now Manchester Cathedral; the domestic premises of the college now house Chetham's School of Music and Chetham's Library.

Around the 14th century, Manchester had seen an influx of Flemish weavers, sometimes credited as the foundation of the regions textile industry. Manchester became an important centre for the manufacture and trade of woolens and linen, and by about 1540, had expanded to become, in John Leland's words, "The fairest, best builded, quickest, and most populous town of all Lancashire." The cathedral and Chetham's buildings are the only significant survivors of Leland's Manchester.

Significant quantities of cotton began to be used after about 1600, firstly in linen/cotton fustians, but by around 1750 pure cotton fabrics were being produced and cotton had overtaken wool in importance. The Irwell and Mersey were made navigable by 1736, opening a route from Manchester to the sea docks on the Mersey. The Bridgewater Canal, Britain's first wholly artificial waterway, was opened in 1761, bringing coal from mines at Worsley to central Manchester. The canal was extended to the Mersey at Runcorn by 1776. The combination of competition and improved efficiency halved the cost of coal and halved the transport cost of raw cotton.

Manchester's became the dominant marketplace for textiles produced in the surrounding towns A commodities exchange, opened in 1729, and numerous large warehouses aided commerce. In 1780, Richard Arkwright began construction of Manchester's first cotton mill.

Industrial Revolution
Manchester (or Cottonopolis as it was sometimes referred) during the early 19th century.During the 19th century Manchester grew to become the centre of Lancashire's cotton industry and was dubbed "Cottonopolis". During this period the canal system grew, and Manchester became one end of the world's first intercity passenger railway - the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

Manchester quickly grew into an important industrial centre. At that time, it seemed a place in which anything could happen - new industrial processes, new ways of thinking (the so called "Manchester School", promoting free trade and laissez-faire), new classes or groups in society, new religious sects, and new forms of labour organisation. It attracted educated visitors from all parts of Britain and Europe. A saying capturing this sense of innovation survives today: "What Manchester does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow."

As well as being a centre of capitalism the city saw its fair share of rebellion by the working and non-titled classes, with the most famous being the events on St Peter's Field on 16 August 1819 which have become known as 'Peterloo'. The first Trades Union Congress was held in Manchester (at the Mechanics' Institute, David Street), from 2 to 6 June 1868. Manchester was the subject of Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, Engels himself spending much of his life in and around Manchester. Manchester was also an important cradle of the Labour Party and the Suffragette Movement. In 1878 the GPO provided its first telephones to a firm in Manchester.

Manchester's golden age was perhaps the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Many of the great public buildings (including the Town Hall) date from then. The city's cosmopolitan atmosphere contributed to a vibrant culture, which included the Hallé Orchestra. In 1889, when county councils were created in England, the municipal borough became a county borough with even greater autonomy. During this period, the Manchester Ship Canal was created by the canalisation of the Rivers Irwell and Mersey for 36 miles (58 km) from Salford to the Mersey estuary. This enabled ocean going ships to sail right into the Port of Manchester. By 1963 the port was the UK's third largest and employed over 3000 men, but the canal was unable to handle the increasingly large container ships. Traffic declined, and the port closed in 1982.[34]

Manchester suffered greatly from the inter-war depression and the underlying structural changes that began to supplant the old industries, including textile manufacture.

World War II
During World War II Manchester was involved in heavy industrial construction. The city was attacked a number of times by the Luftwaffe, particularly in the "Christmas Blitz" of 1941, which destroyed a large part of the historic city centre. In 1940 Manchester Cathedral was partially destroyed by a German air-raid.

The devastation left by the IRA bombing (1996 bomb)
Manchester has a history of attacks attributed to Irish Republicanists, including arson in 1920, a series of explosions in 1939, and two bombs in 1992. On Saturday 15 June 1996, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) detonated a large bomb adjacent to a department store in the city centre. The largest to be detonated on British soil, the bomb caused over 200 injuries, heavily damaged nearby buildings, and broke windows half a mile away. The cost of the immediate damage was initially estimated at £50 million, but this was quickly revised upwards. The final insurance payout has been estimated at over £400 million, and many affected businesses never recovered from the loss of trade.

Redevelopment

Manchester City Centre from the Beetham TowerSpurred by the investment after the 1996 bomb, and aided by the XVII Commonwealth Games, Manchester's city centre has undergone extensive regeneration. New and renovated complexes such as The Printworks and the Triangle have become popular shopping and entertainment destinations. The Manchester Arndale is the UK's largest city centre shopping mall.

Exchange Square undergoing regeneration.Large sections of the city dating from the 1960s have been either demolished and re-developed or modernised with the use of glass and steel. Old mills have been converted into modern apartments, Hulme has undergone extensive regeneration programmes, and million-pound lofthouse apartments have since been developed. The 169 metre tall, 47-storey Beetham Tower, completed in 2006, is the tallest building in the UK outside London and highest residential accommodation in the Western Europe. The lower 23 floors form the Hilton Hotel, featuring a 'sky bar' on the 23rd floor. Its upper 24 floors are apartments.

Nightlife
The central fountain in Piccadilly GardensManchester played several key roles in the development of nightclub and DJ culture (see main article on Culture of Manchester). One of the oldest venues is the Band on the Wall, a live music club in the Northern Quarter. It was built around 1862 as the flagship pub of a local brewery and originally called The George & Dragon. In 1975 it was taken on by jazz musician Steve Morris and Frank Cusick, and renamed The Band on the Wall, a longtime nickname for the club since the late 1920s alluding to its stage high on the back wall.

Along with other areas that are frequented by late night revellers (such as Castlefield, Deansgate Locks, the Printworks and the Northern Quarter), Manchester boasts the famous Canal Street, the centre of the city's gay community. This was made famous by the Channel 4 programme, 'Queer as Folk', and is the centre of the annual Pride celebrations, held on the last weekend in August.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester