Celebrating our ancestors’ work in key trades
THE BIRTH OF ‘COTTONOPOLIS’
One of the workers at Jones’ Cotton Mill, Manchester, c1909
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Manchester’s prominence in pop music earned it the sobriquet ‘Madchester’, but in the 19th century another industry won it a very different nickname. Manchester was a global centre of textile manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution, powered by the cotton mills built from the 1780s onwards. The number of mills reached a peak of 108 in 1853, the same year that Manchester won city status. Conditions in the factories were difficult and dangerous, and some of them employed more than 1,000 workers including women and children. You can find out more about Manchester’s crucial role in the cotton industry – at one point importing an estimated one billion tonnes of raw material every year – at the Textiles Gallery in the city’s Science and Industry Museum: scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/textiles-gallery.