In the 19th century, Manchester was the global centre of cotton manufacturing. Within 50 miles of the city centre – across Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire – there were almost 2,500 mills employing more than 400,000 people. Visitors to the world’s first industrial city were awestruck: when the French diplomat and historian Alexis de Tocqueville came to the city in 1835, he wrote of “a thousand noises” rising from Manchester’s “damp, dark labyrinth”, of “the crunching wheels of machines, the shriek of steam from the boilers, [and] the regular beat of looms”.
