Day 34 - Manchester: Tours by Locals

First off, Tours by locals https://www.toursbylocals.com is very cool. It is you and a local taxi driver (generally) telling you about the city, with stops for pics, and if there is something you want to see, they take you there.

John was our tour guide and gave us an overview of the city of Manchester. Before we began the tour, all I knew about Manchester was Man City and Man U football, lol. There is a lot more to the city than football - although that legacy is long and distinguished.  We learned so much, there is not enough space to write it all here; but here are some high points.

When a town ends in chester (Manchester, Winchester, Dorchester) it means that the place is the site of a Roman military camp or fort.  Manchester has a large area called Castlefield that has cool Roman ruins.  Later, when the Vikings came, they took the castle stones elsewhere to build their own area.  Why mine new stones, when the Romans had already done the work?

Manchester was the first industrial city in the world, and cotton was the key. Cotton put Manchester at the heart of a global network of manufacturing and trade. Because it was an industrial city, there is not much green space and in that time, there was not much city housing. The land was valued as commercial and nothing else. Post industrialization, Manchester has reinvented itself as a tech hub, media hub, and a large university city.

During Covid there was a migration away from London to other cities, and Manchester was one of them. It is about a 2-hour commute, but if you don’t have to go in daily and housing is a quarter of what it is in London, it is a win win. Currently, many of the old industrial buildings are being remade into housing, either rentals or places to purchase.

Weirdly, to be classified as a city in the UK you must have a town hall, a cathedral, and a university. We do not have this rule at home.

Football (or soccer for us Americans) is huge here. John told us that Manchester United was created in 1878 and Manchester City was created in 1880, making them doomed to always be the little brother to Man U.  Many name changes have gotten them to their current logos. Since the Davies clan (my niece Colleen, Jonathan, Charlie, Matt, and Annie) are Man City people, we only took a pic on Man U.  But we walked around Man City and shopped at the team store!

The biggest thing about Manchester that we did not know is the history of the canals along with the lack of love for Liverpool (in business and football). Manchester is inland but is considered a port city. In order to do business in the freaking 1700s, the Bridgewater Canal was built to get coal from the mines in Worsley to Manchester and then to Runcorn, which has access to the sea. It is an impressive accomplishment to visualize and build by hand (8 years) a canal to move your product more efficiently. And I’m sure to screw Liverpool over, lol.

There is so much more that we could say.  But we will incorporate that in over the next four days of tooling around Manchester.