2. The ‘Shock City’ of Industrial Capitalism, c1780-c1840

This chapter starts by looking at how steam-powered cotton mills came to dominate the townscape with the genesis of factory production. This generated an architecture of industrial discipline as exhibited in the district of Ancoats. It then examines how a peculiar geography of class polarisation emerged in Manchester, with institutions of coercion surrounding working class districts, with middle class cultural institutions centred around Mosely Street in the heart of the town. This is a phase of open social conflict, focused on the battle of public space, as epitomised by the infamous Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the rise of Chartism. It ends by highlighting how Manchester Georgian ‘polite society’ found itself entrapped within urban contradictions of industrialisation, and slowly retreated from the centre to form middle class residential suburbs.