The Entire History of Manchester in 28 Minutes

0:00 Manchester today, it's a city of music and football, of scientific breakthroughs [music] and industrial heritage. It's where Oasis battled Blur, where Manchester United and Manchester City football club rivalry defines the city, even where the atom was first split. But how did we get here? In this video, you're going to travel back in time, nearly 2,000 years, to witness the complete evolution of Manchester from its very beginning. We'll watch a Roman fort rise from the wilderness, see a medieval market town emerge, witness the birth of the industrial revolution that changed human civilization, and follow Manchester's transformation [music] into the vibrant modern metropolis it is

0:46 today. Using AI technology, we can now transform old engravings and historical photographs [music] into vivid, realistic scenes, bringing Manchester's extraordinary past back to life [music] before your eyes. Let's begin with the Romans. It's the year 79 AD. Governor Ganas Julius Agricola is pushing Roman conquest northward [music] into what's now norm England. His legions need a fort to control the routes between the fortresses at Chester and York. They choose a sandstone bluff overlooking the confluence of two rivers, the Medlock and the Urwell. The local Bgantes [music] tribe calls the area something

1:32 like breastshaped hill. [music] In Latin, this becomes Mimusium. The fort that rises here can house about 500 auxiliary soldiers. It's not glamorous. This is frontier country, cold and wet, far from Rome's Mediterranean [music] heartland. The soldiers, many from modern-day Spain [music] Germany, and North Africa, build their rectangular fort with earthen [music] ramparts and wooden palisades. Eventually, they rebuild in stone. A small civilian settlement, [music] a Vikus, grows up outside the fort's walls. traders, crafts people, families of soldiers, maybe a few hundred people

2:18 at most. They build a bath house. There's a manio, a kind of Roman inn for official travelers. Pottery is made and grain is ground. Life continues at the edge of empire. For three centuries, [music] Mimusium sits here. Then in 410 AD, Rome collapses and the legions withdraw. The official Roman infrastructure crumbles. Within a generation, the stone buildings are being pillaged for materials. The roads are cracking and the civilian settlement is largely abandoned. The Romans leave behind stones and place names, but not much else. Mimusium fades into obscurity.

3:07 >> [music] >> We know almost nothing about Manchester between Roman withdrawal and the Norman conquest. The name shifts. Mimusium becomes Mimiest in old English. Eventually Manchester [music] there's probably a small Anglo-Saxon settlement, maybe a church, but no records survive. [music] When the Doomsday Book is compiled in 1086, Manchester [music] gets barely a mention. It's part of the manner of Sulford. Population, perhaps a few hundred at most. It's nothing special, just another cluster [music] of wooden buildings in the northwest. But slowly, quietly, Manchester begins to grow. In

3:53 1222 [music] a lord of the manor gets permission to hold a market. Markets mean trade and [music] trade means money. The settlement expands around the market cross. A parish church, St. [music] Mary's, later Manchester Cathedral, is built on the site of earlier [music] Saxon churches. By the 1300s, it's being rebuilt in perpendicular [music] Gothic style. The town is still tiny by any standard. In 1400, perhaps 1,500 [music] people live here. It's surrounded by marshland. The rivers [music] flood constantly. It's agricultural, muddy, and unremarkable. What Manchester [music] does have is wool. The surrounding Lanasher

4:40 countryside produces wool, and Manchester [music] becomes a center for wool trading and cloth making. It's small scale done in homes and workshops, but it's something. Then comes the [music] Reformation. Henry VIII dissolves the monasteries in the 1530s. Manchester, never heavily monastic, [music] survives relatively unscathed. The church becomes a collegiate [music] church in 1421, essentially run by a college of priests, and it endures. During [music] the English Civil War, Manchester backs Parliament against the king. In 1642, royalist [music] forces attack the town. The defenders, mostly local militia with

5:26 makeshift weapons, somehow hold them off. Manchester [music] becomes known as a parliamentarian stronghold. By 1650, the population has grown to maybe 5,000. It's becoming a proper town with a grammar [music] school founded in 1515, some wealth from textiles, and a growing reputation as a commercial center. But it's still not special. Not yet. Everything changes in the 1700s. [music] Cotton fabric imported from India becomes fashionable in England in the late 1600s. It's lighter than wool, easier to wash, and dyes [music] beautifully. There's just one problem.

6:13 Britain doesn't grow cotton. It has to be imported [music] as raw fiber and then spun and woven into cloth. And here's where Manchester's story becomes [music] inseparable from slavery. The cotton flowing into Manchester comes primarily [music] from plantations in the American South and the Caribbean, worked by enslaved [music] Africans. Ships leave British ports carrying manufactured goods to Africa. They trade those [music] goods for enslaved people. They transport those people packed in [music] horrific conditions to the Americas. The ships then return to Britain loaded with raw cotton, sugar and tobacco. This is the triangular [music] trade and Manchester is at the heart of it. Lancasher with its damp climate perfect

7:00 for working cotton becomes the center of cotton [music] manufacturing. At first, it's cottage industry. Spinners work at home with spinning wheels. Weavers work hand looms in their cottages. Merchants collect the finished cloth and sell it, often back to plantation [music] owners to clothe the people they've enslaved. Then the inventions begin. In 1764, James Hargreaves invents the spinning Jenny, a machine that can spin multiple threads at once. In 1769, Richard Arkrite patents the water frame, a spinning machine powered by water. In 1779 [music] Samuel Crompton combines them into the spinning mule. Suddenly, one person with

7:46 a machine can do the [music] work of dozens. These machines are too big and too expensive for cottages. They need power, water wheels, and later [music] steam engines. They need buildings to house them. The factory is born. The first cotton mills rise in Manchester and the surrounding towns in the 1780s and 1790s. They're [music] multi-story brick buildings filled with machines, powered by steam, employing hundreds [music] of workers under one roof. By 1800, Manchester is transforming [music] from a market town into something the world has never seen before, an industrial city. Cotton is king. The mills are multiplying. The population is surging. The stage [music] is set. The

8:33 19th century is about to witness Manchester's greatest triumphs. and its darkest [music] struggles. The 19th century begins with Manchester already transformed into something unprecedented, an industrial city. In 1801, the population is around 70,000. The cotton mills dominate the skyline. Steam engines fill the air with smoke. This is the future, and it's being built in Manchester. But the human cost is staggering. Workers live crammed into backto-back terrace houses in narrow courts. Entire families sharing single rooms. There's no sanitation, no clean

9:19 water. Disease spreads [music] easily. The factories run 12, 14, 16 hours a day. Children as young as 5 or 6 work in the mills. Their small hands perfect for crawling under machines to collect loose cotton. Accidents are common. Lungs fill with cotton dust. The average life expectancy in 1840s Manchester is just 25 years. People keep coming anyway. What choice do they have? The countryside [music] offers no work. At least in Manchester, there are wages, however meager. Irish immigrants flood in, especially after the [music] potato famine of the 1840s. The city expands in all directions,

10:06 chaotic and unplanned. Yet the wealth being generated is extraordinary. By the 1830s, Manchester and the surrounding towns produce most of the world's cotton goods. Cottonopoulos, they call it. The irony is brutal. Some of the poorest people in England are processing cotton picked by enslaved people in America. Neither group sees much of the wealth they create. The mill owners, the merchants, the middlemen, they're getting rich. Everyone else is struggling to survive. And many of Manchester's workers are starting to ask, "Why can't we vote?" By 1819, the frustration has reached [music] breaking

10:52 point. Manchester is one of England's largest cities, yet it has no members of parliament. Most working people have no say in how they're governed, no voice in the laws that control their lives. On August 16th, 1819, a crowd gathers at St. Peter's Field. 60 to 80,000 people, men, women, children, come peacefully to hear Henry Hunt speak about parliamentary reform. They're dressed in their Sunday best. Families bring picnic baskets. Banners call for liberty and representation. The local magistrates panic at the size of the crowd. They order the arrest [music] of Hunt. They send in the local yomenry, part-time cavalry, many of them

11:38 drunk, armed with sabers. What happens next is carnage. The ymanry charge into the packed crowd, slashing with their swords at anyone in their way. People scream, try to run, trip over each other. The professional soldiers, the 15th Hzars, are then ordered in. The stampede [music] intensifies. When it's over, 15 people are dead. Over 600 are injured, many with saber wounds. Hunt and the other organizers are arrested and imprisoned. But the name sticks. Peteroo. A bitter mockery of Waterloo. This wasn't a glorious victory. This was the British state attacking its own people for demanding [music] basic rights. Peteroo doesn't

12:26 win reform immediately, but it plants seeds. The memory [music] of that day galvanizes the movement for change. Manchester's workers will eventually gain political power to match their economic importance. 11 years after Peteroo, Manchester makes [music] history again, but this time with innovation, not violence. The 15th of September 1830, a massive crowd gathers near Liverpool Road. The world's first modern passenger railway is about to open. George Stevenson's locomotive, the Rocket, will pull carriages between Liverpool and Manchester at the previously unimaginable speed of 30 mph. [music] A journey that once took a full day by

13:13 canal will now take less than 2 hours. The day should [music] be triumphant. Instead, it becomes tragic. William Huskerson, a member of Parliament, [music] gets out of his carriage to greet the Duke of Wellington. He wanders onto the track, distracted. The rocket [music] hits him. He dies that evening. History's first railway passenger fatality. But despite the tragedy, the railway [music] changes everything. Within a decade, rails radiate out from Manchester [music] in every direction. Raw cotton pours in faster than ever. Finished [music] cloth flows out to markets across the globe. The industrial system becomes even more

13:58 efficient, even more profitable, [music] even more dominant. Manchester is connecting to [music] the world. By the 1830s and 1840s, the anti-slavery movement is [music] gaining strength in Britain. More people are confronting the moral horror of slavery. Britain abolished [music] the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in its colonies in 1833. [music] But Manchester is conflicted. The cotton still has [music] to come from somewhere. American slavery continues and many Manchester mill owners don't want to talk about where their raw material comes from. It's uncomfortable. It's bad for business. Yet many Manchester workers [music] see the

14:43 connection. They're exploited by millown owners. Enslaved people are exploited [music] by plantation owners. The system is the same, just different degrees of brutality. In 1842, a young German man named Friedrich Engles arrives in [music] Manchester to work in his father's cotton business. He's 22 years old, well educated, from a wealthy family. Nothing has prepared him [music] for what he sees. Engles walks through the slums. He documents [music] everything. The cellers where families live in darkness and damp, the open sewers, the children with ricketetts, the workers coughing up blood from cotton lung. He sees the

15:29 mills, the relentless machinery, the 14-hour shifts, the casual cruelty. In 1845, he publishes the condition of the working class in England. It's a devastating expose of industrial capitalism at its worst. Engles meets Karl Marx and they become lifelong collaborators. Together in 1848, they [music] write the communist manifesto. Later, the money from Engle's family cotton mill helps fund Marx's research for Das Capital. Then in 1861, everything comes to a head. The American Civil War begins. The Union Navy blockades Confederate ports. Within

16:16 months, raw cotton stops flowing to Britain, and Manchester's [music] mills run out of supply. By 1862, the Lanasher cotton famine [music] has begun. The mills close and hundreds of thousands of [music] workers lose their jobs. Families starve. Soup kitchens open across the city, but they can't feed everyone. Children beg in the streets. It's a humanitarian [music] catastrophe. Confederate diplomats come to Britain with an offer. Support the South. Break the blockade and cotton will flow again. Your workers will have jobs. Your mills [music] will run. All you have to do is support our right to keep people enslaved. Manchester's workers face an impossible

17:03 choice. Support the Confederacy and end their own suffering or support the Union [music] and abolition and keep starving. On New Year's Eve 1862, thousands [music] gather at the Free Trade Hall. They debate. They vote. They draft [music] a letter to Abraham Lincoln. They choose abolition. The vast [music] progress which you have made in the short space of 20 months fills us with hope. They write that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed. And that the erasure of that foul blot on civilization and Christianity chatt slavery during your presidency will cause the name of Abraham [music] Lincoln to be honored and revered by

17:49 posterity. They're starving. They're desperate. and they choose to [music] keep starving rather than support slavery. Lincoln writes back deeply moved. I know [music] and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to [music] endure in this crisis. I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any [music] age or in any country. American cotton resumed gradually. Southern cotton production took years to recover and it was now grown by freed people working as sharecroers. [music] Though not slavery, most were still working in terrible conditions.

18:36 But it was progress. The cotton famine [music] ends in 1865 when the Civil War does. The workers have made a moral stand. The city's relationship with slavery becomes part of its historical reckoning. A statue of Lincoln stands [music] in Manchester today in Lincoln Square commemorating that choice. By the 1870s, Manchester [music] is wealthy beyond imagination. It's the sixth largest city in Europe. Cotton has made fortunes and some of that wealth, not enough but some, goes into building something lasting. In 1877, [music] the new town hall opens. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, it's a Gothic revival masterpiece that dominates the city

19:22 center. [music] Inside, the great hall soarses upward, decorated with [music] murals by Ford Maddox Brown, showing Manchester's history from Roman times through medieval [music] markets to the industrial present. The building declares, [music] "We're not just a grimy factory town. We have culture. We have ambition. We have arrived." [music] By 1900, Manchester's population has reached 544,000. [music] The city produces cotton goods for the entire world. The saying goes, "What Manchester does today, the world does tomorrow." As the new century dawn, Manchester stands [music] at the peak of its power and influence. Sadly, it won't

20:07 last. The new century opens with a statement. When John Ryland's dies in 1888, he's one of the richest men in England. He earns cotton mills, but he's also funded libraries, schools, and charities. His widow, Enrika, decides to build something extraordinary in his memory. A library [music] that will rival anything in Europe. The John Ryland's Library opens in 1900 on Deansgate. [music] She hired architect Basil Champnes to create something extraordinary. It's breathtaking, neo gothic with soaring vated [music] reading rooms, intricate stone carving,

20:53 and stained glass that makes it feel [music] like a cathedral. It's built to house rare books and manuscripts, a temple to learning in the heart of the industrial city. You can still visit it today. It's one of the [music] most beautiful libraries in the world. But darker times are coming. World War I devastates Manchester like everywhere else. Thousands enlist. The PAL's battalions [music] units of men from the same towns and workplaces suffer horrific [music] casualties. Entire streets lose their young men on the same day at the SO. But the war stimulates industry. Manchester's factories [music] produce uniforms, munitions, machinery. Women take factory

21:40 jobs in unprecedented numbers. The inter war years are difficult. International [music] competition grows. American and Japanese cotton mills are more efficient. Indian independence movements boycott British cotton. A deliberate rejection of the colonial [music] trade that enriched Manchester while impoverishing India. Manchester's dominance in textiles begins to slip. Then World War II. Manchester is a major industrial center and a target. The Manchester Blitz begins in December 1940. [music] For two nights, December 22nd and 23rd, German bombers pound the city center. Over 600 people die. Thousands of

22:26 buildings are destroyed or damaged. The historic center is gutted. After 1945, Manchester struggles. The textile industry continues its long decline. Mills close. Jobs disappear. The city that made the modern world is being left behind by it. By the 1960s and '7s, central Manchester is depressed. Victorian warehouses stand empty. The city feels tired, grimy, past its prime. The slum clearances of the 1960s demolish huge swades of Victorian terrorist housing. Communities destroyed in the name of modernization. They're replaced with tower blocks and concrete estates that quickly develop

23:13 their own problems. But Manchester still has music. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, the Smiths before them. Manchester [music] is producing some of the most influential music in Britain. football too. Manchester United founded as Newton [music] Heath in 1878 and Manchester City become two of England's most [music] famous clubs. When United's Busby babes die in the Munich Air disaster of 1958, the city [music] mourns together. When United wins the European Cup in 1968 with Bobby Charlton and George Best, the city celebrates together. Music and football become part of Manchester's [music] identity as cotton

23:59 fades from memory. In the [music] 1980s and '90s, Manchester starts converting its massive Victorian warehouses, relics of the cotton trade into apartments, offices, bars, and restaurants. The once derelict area becomes vibrant. Young professionals move into the city center. The Commonwealth [music] Games in 2002 provide another boost. The Etihad [music] Stadium is built. East Manchester is regenerated. The city looks modern, confident forwardlooking. Universities expand [music] massively. The University of Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan University together educate [music] over 100,000

24:45 students. The city is young again. Over 40% of the population is under 30. Media companies [music] relocate from London. The BBC moves significant operations to Media City UK in Sulford Keys. A former industrial dockland transformed [music] into a gleaming modern quarter. By 2010, Manchester is booming again. >> [music] >> Today, Manchester is a city of about 630,000 people, though the Greater Manchester urban area contains over [music] 3 million, making it Britain's second largest connibation. The city has reinvented itself. Cotton mills are now luxury apartments.

25:32 Warehouses are tech startups and creative agencies. Spinning fields, where [music] textile warehouses once stood, is now a financial district with glass towers. The music scene continues. From Joy Division to Oasis to contemporary [music] artists, Manchester keeps producing influential bands. The nightife is legendary. The gay village centered on Canal Street is one of [music] Europe's largest and most vibrant LGBTQ plus communities. Football has gone global. Manchester [music] United and Manchester City have fans in every country, but challenges remain. Inequality is stark. Some areas are among the most deprived in England.

26:17 Homelessness is highly visible on city center streets. The gap between [music] rich and poor is growing. The 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, a terrorist attack after an Ariana [music] Grande concert that killed 22 people. many of them children shocked the city. But the response showed [music] Manchester's character. The city came together. The worker bee, Manchester's [music] symbol since the industrial revolution, representing the industriousness of the city's workers, became a symbol of solidarity. Tattoos, murals, tributes appeared across the city. We stand together. From Roman fort to medieval [music] market

27:03 town to the world's first industrial city to a modern post-industrial metropolis, Manchester has continually transformed itself. The city's buildings may change, but the character of its people resilient innovative defiant remains constant. [music] Thanks for watching this journey through Manchester's fascinating history. Creating these deep [music] dives into a city's complete story takes a huge amount of time and research. And I'm passionate about bringing these histories [music] to life using AI to transform old images into vivid scenes. If you enjoyed this exploration [music] of how a Roman outpost became the birthplace of the industrial revolution and reinvented itself for the 21st

27:50 century, please hit the like button and subscribe for more content like this. and let me know in the comments what city should I cover next. As always, we'll see you in the past.