Manchester: industrial revolution's birthplace poised for green renaissance

Submissions to the Manchester Report, a project to find the solution to climate change, closes today

Terry Wyke
guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 May 2009 13.51 BST

History divides itself into two parts: the world before the industrial revolution and the world after the industrial revolution. The transformation began in Britain in the 18th century, spreading across the world to become the public goal of every nation. The new industrial towns — the Coketowns of Dickens' novels — were at the forefront of this change, none more so than Manchester. Manchester's pivotal role makes it the perfect city to host this year's Manchester report, a new project designed to mitigate the environmental consequences of the industrial revolution.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Manchester was a pretty market town, its population living in a handful of streets. All that was to change. Cotton and coal were the drivers of the transformation, which had many factors behind its transformation into the world's first industrial city.
Lancashire was a producer of coal, Manchester a consumer. The town's demand for coal was the reason for the construction of the world's first modern canal, the Bridgewater Canal. Coal was also the fuel that burned in the fireboxes of the new railway engines. Manchester became the terminus of the line that carried cotton to and from docks at Liverpool. Coal consumption in Manchester was measured in millions of tonnes, and its smoke became, as Lewis Mumford remarked, "the very incense of the new industrialism".
Manchester grew at an astonishing rate, and its booming economy attracted migrants from all over Britain. Districts such as Hulme which had hardly troubled the early census takers — there were only 30 houses in 1774 — boasted a population of more than 50,000 by 1851. Such expansion created a nasty urban environment in which living conditions were appalling. Water supply, sewage disposal, housing, epidemics and the disposal of the dead were high on a long list of problems that swamped the resources of an archaic system of local government.
Air pollution was not the most immediate of problems but the canopy of smoke that belched from industrial and domestic chimneys began to attract attention. Sooty Manchester witnessed the birth of modern environmental concerns thanks to the scientist Robert Angus Smith. Scottish born and educated, Smith arrived in Manchester in the early 1840s and became an expert on atmospheric pollution.
Manchester proved to be an ideal laboratory for his pioneering investigations. He advanced the understanding of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the impact of an impure atmosphere upon plant and human life. Measuring the impurities in rain was one of his concerns, and though he may not have coined the term, he was was one of the first to observe acid rain.
Smith lived long enough to see the establishment in Manchester of a Noxious Vapours Abatement Society, a pressure group that raised awareness of the problems of atmospheric pollution in a city in which the buildings appeared to have been carved from blocks of soot. Their search for technical solutions to the smoke, their recognition of the need for cooperation in dealing with problems that crossed administrative boundaries, their brewing of public opinion by means of exhibitions, public lectures and the media, and their struggle to change public behaviour ought to strike a chord with modern environmentalists.
If you attend the Manchester report conference on climate change in July, walk the short distance from Manchester's Albert Square to All Saints, the site of Smith's analytical laboratory. A plaque marks the exact location of where the battle began against the revolution's uglier face.
Terry Wyke teaches social and economic history at Manchester Metropolitan University
Today is the final day to submit your plan for tackling climate change to the Manchester report