Manchester

Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in North West England with an estimated population of 512,000. It lies within the United Kingdom's second most populous urban area Greater Manchester which has a population of 2,553,379. Manchester is located in the south-central part of North West England, fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south and the Pennines to the north and east, and an arc of towns with which it forms a continuous conurbation. The local authority is Manchester City Council, and the city's inhabitants are referred to as Mancunians.

The recorded history of Manchester began with the civilian settlement associated with the Roman fort of Mamucium, which was established in c. 79 CE on a sandstone bluff near the confluence of the rivers Medlock and Irwell. Historically, Manchester was in Lancashire, although areas of Cheshire, south of the River Mersey were incorporated into the city during the 20th century. Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township but began to expand "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century.

Manchester's unplanned urbanisation was brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution, and resulted in it becoming the world's first industrialised city. The building of the Bridgewater Canal in 1761 built to transport coal triggered an early-19th-century factory building boom which transformed Manchester from a township into a major mill town and borough that was granted city status in 1853. In 1877, the Neo Gothic Manchester Town Hall was built and in 1894 the 36-mile Manchester Ship Canal opened; which at the time was the longest river navigation canal in the world, which in turn created the Port of Manchester linking the city to sea. Manchester's fortunes decreased in the subsequent years after WW2 due to deindustrialisation. However, investment in the last two decades, spurred by the IRA's 1996 Manchester bombing – which was the largest bomb ever detonated in peacetime Britain – spearheaded extensive regeneration of Manchester.

Today Manchester is ranked as a beta world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network; The city is notable for its architecture, culture, music scene, media links, scientific and engineering output, social impact and sporting connections. Sports clubs which bear the city name include Premier League football teams, Manchester City and Manchester United. Manchester was the site of the world's first railway station, and the place where scientists first split the atom and developed the first stored-programme computer. Manchester is served by two universities, including the largest single-site university in the UK, and its metropolitan economy is the third largest in the United Kingdom with a GDP of $88.3bn (2012 est., PPP). As of 2011 Manchester is the fastest growing major city in the UK[13] and the third-most visited city in the UK by foreign visitors, after London and Edinburgh, and the most visited in England outside London.