Present-day Manchester is home to 552,000 residents, at the centre of a wider region of 2.87 million, the product of three centuries of migration and economic change.
It is a city with a global reputation for its cultural and sporting influence, a long list of world firsts in science and technology, and as a centre of political reform movements.
Cheek-by-jowl with the rising Manc-hattan skyscrapers stand many of the old warehouses and mills, repurposed into modern apartment and office blocks along the outward-creeping fringe of gentrification. A few remnants of the pre-industrial market town remain around the Cathedral Quarter while the grand late-Victorian warehouses and civic architecture recall a time when cotton was king and Manchester was its capital.
