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Few cities in the world have embraced social change so heartily as MANCHESTER . From engine of the Industrial Revolution to test-bed of contemporary urban design, the city has no realistic provincial English rival. Its domestic dominance expresses itself in various ways, most swaggeringly in the success of Manchester United, the richest football club in Britain, but also in a thriving music and cultural scene that has given birth to world-beaters as diverse as the Hallé Orchestra and Oasis. Moreover, the city's concert halls, theatres, clubs and café society are boosted by England's largest student population and a blossoming gay community whose spending-power has created a pioneering Gay Village. For inspiration, Manchester's planners look to Barcelona - another revitalized industrial powerhouse - and, like Barcelona, the promise of a major sports event has powered much of the recent urban regeneration. The city didn't get the Olympics, though it wasn't for the want of trying, but instead landed the 2002 Commonwealth Games .

Manchester's rapid growth was the equal of any flowering of the Industrial Revolution - from little more than a village in 1750 to the world's major cotton-milling centre in only a hundred years. The spectacular rise of Cottonopolis , as it became known, came from the production of competitively priced imitations of expensive Indian calicoes, using machines evolved from Arkwright's first steam-powered cotton mill, which opened in 1783. The rapid industrialization of the area brought prosperity for a few but a life of misery for the majority. Exploitation had worsened still further by the time the 23-year-old Friedrich Engels came here in 1842 to work in his father's cotton plant, and the suffering he witnessed - recorded in his Condition of the Working Class in England - was a seminal influence on his later collaboration with Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto .

Waterways and railway viaducts form the matrix into which the city's principal buildings have been bedded - as early as 1772 the Duke of Bridgewater had a canal cut to connect the city to the coal mines at Worsley, and the world's first passenger rail line, connecting Manchester with Liverpool, was opened in 1830. The Manchester Ship Canal, constructed to entice ocean-going vessels into Manchester and away from burgeoning Liverpool, was completed in 1894, and played a crucial part in reviving Manchester's competitiveness. Within sixty years, though, Manchester's docks, mills and canals were in steep decline. The traditional image of the struggling post-industrial city was of empty mills and factories, and rows of back-to-back houses - an image perpetuated, to an extent, by the popularity of Britain's longest-running TV soap opera, Coronation Street . Sporadic efforts were made to pull Manchester out of the economic doldrums of the 1960s and 1970s, but the main engine of change was the devastating IRA bomb , which exploded in June 1996 and wiped out much of the city's commercial infrastructure. Rather than simply patch up the buildings, the planning authorities embarked on an ambitious rebuilding scheme, which also came to embrace the Commonwealth Games' facilities and innovative millennium design projects. Entire new districts have taken shape as once-blighted areas along the canals are reclaimed for retail and residential use.