Manchester Cotton Districts Learning Journey
Come with Victorian visitors and follow the Learning Journey steps into Manchester's busy cotton districts.
Click on the steps below to explore.
 |  |  |  |  |  |
|
Manchester Cotton Districts Learning Journey Step 2: Warehouses and Merchants Districts
* Cheetham Hill * City Centre These districts are the heart of the trading empire where the inspection of wares, the buying and selling and money making is done. Merchants used to live in the City but not since about 1825. Gone are their gracious houses for they were not large enough. They have so much cotton to sell that they have built huge warehouses, between five and seven storeys high, in all the streets around the centre of the City. The merchants themselves now live out in the more genteel districts of Cheetham Hill and Ardwick Green, just to the north and east of the City Centre. '...Manchester may be roughly divided into three great regions. The central of these - laying around the heart of the Exchange - is the grand district of warehouses and counting rooms. There the fabrics spun, wove, printed and dyed at the mills are stored for inspection and purchase. There the actual business of buying and selling is carried on. There are banks, offices agencies innumerable...' (Angus Bethune Reach, 1849 - 50) '...Market Street is always busy, noisy, and interesting, and contains numbers of splendid shops. In the evening its thousands of gas-lights glittering from the shops and street lamps make it almost painfully dazzling to eyes not yet accustomed to these nightly illuminations of the great English cities...let us now turn into one of the by-streets which diverge from Market Street, into Mosley Street, or Cooper Street, for instance. Here stand the great warehouses, five or six stories high, all large and imposing, some of them stately and elegant. At night these warehouses are brilliantly lighted from top to bottom...' (Johann Georg Kohl,1844) Further reading: Kohl, Johann Georg. Journeys through England & Wales. pp106-147. (1844) Reach, Angus Bethune. Manchester and the Textile Districts. (1849) See also: Cheetham Hill in the Manchester Cottonopolis section and Warehouse City in the Cotton Trading section of Marketing (under Industry) of this web site. |
 | |
| Associated Objects | |
| |
| Related Narratives | |
| |
