5. City of Ambition and Popular Culture, c1890-c1920

This chapter considers the most expansive phase of Manchester’s urban growth at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The phase was defined by the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal together with Salford Quays between 1887 and 1894, which represented another radical urban intervention that helped reorientate developments during the so-called ‘second Industrial Revolution’. It was this phase that witnessed the formal expansion of the city’s boundaries to incorporate the surrounding satellite townships, now integrated together by a new tram network, creating a ‘Greater Manchester’. It is a time when the city’s Corporation was most visible in the urban arena through its supply of public utilities, and in the setting up of suburban libraries, parks and swimming baths (amongst other things). In tandem with these municipal improvements there was the conspicuous rise of urban leisure and popular culture in the form of theatres, cinemas, pleasure gardens and sports arenas. Lastly, this was the phase when the presence of a working class became more openly expressed in the architecture and physical fabric of the city; a reflection of the burgeoning power of organised labour.