ABSTRACT
MANCHESTER, the third largest city in England (population 715,000) is the core and pivot of one of the most highly industrialized regions in the world, I that of south-east Lancashire. It includes a population of 10 million people within a radius of fifty miles, and the proportion of the total population employed in manufacturing industry is nearly double that so employed nationally. A market town in the fourteenth century, the cotton industry was established in Manchester in the sixteenth century, and with the development of the mechanical inventions of the nineteenth century, the proximity of coal, an abundance of soft water, and the damp air, it grew rapidly. Gradually the city itself developed as the commercial centre of the cotton industry-the big warehouses were built and the merchants set up their offices there. The actual manufacture of cotton goods was concentrated more in the surrounding towns.
