Read Manchester

If you want to discover more about Manchester history, culture or attractions, here’s what you should read

Manchester, as we’ve said elsewhere in this guide, is a city with a past. Once the world’s biggest centre of manufacturing, this is also a city that has brought about seismic social, political and cultural change across both the UK and the rest of the world – from the birth of socialism to the rave culture of the 1980s and 1990s. So if you’re planning a visit to Manchester, or even if you live here, why not find out more about this city of ours, a place that has, at times, influenced almost every other corner of the globe?

Manchester, England: the Story of the Pop Cult City

Ex-Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam’s critically acclaimed ‘Manchester, England’ is an authoritative, highly readable work of cultural history, opening with Manchester’s place as the world’s first industrial city (featuring tales of Victorian hedonism, the music halls, political uprisings by the Chartists and the Suffragettes) and moving through to its pop music traditions, from 1920s jazz and Northern Soul right through, as you’d expect, to the Hacienda. Awarded Pop Music Book of the Year (Sunday Times, 1999), Haslam’s take on Manchester has been described, with good reason, as ‘the definitive guide to modern Manchester’. Manchester, England, Dave Haslam, £10.79.

The Manchester Compendium: A Street by Street History of England’s Greatest Industrial City

Part travel guide, part history book, this documents in detail (and with irreverent wit) the history of Manchester’s streets, buildings, sons and daughters. If you buy one book on Manchester, make it this one. The Manchester Compendium, Ed Glinert, Penguin, £10.99

Around The M60: Manchester’s Orbital Motorway

According to the Guardian, this book is ‘a lavishly-illustrated and fact-stuffed book which hails [the M60] as an amazing feat of civil engineering, considers its function in a post-industrial age and searches out its curiosities and hidden gems’. We can’t really add to that, though you can read the full review of the book here. In short, if you like your history to be quirky and contemporary (or have a thing for motorways), then this book is for you. Around The M60: Manchester’s Orbital Motorway by Matthew Hyde, Aidan O’Rourke and Peter Portland, AMCD, £24.95.

A Portrait of Manchester

Len Grant is one of Manchester’s finest photographers and has spent his career documenting the rebirth of Manchester. Although this book focuses on contemporary Manchester, it gives an insight into the grit of a city determined to regain its place at the global table. A Portrait of Manchester, Len Grant, Halsgrove, £12.95.

Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain

A photographic record of 30 years’ worth of pop culture by the legendary photographer Kevin Cummins. Stunning photography (of everything from the dance floor at the Hacienda to the less salubrious surroundings of Whalley Range) is supplemented by texts from Paul Morley, Stuart Maconie, Gavin Martin and John Harris. Manchester: Looking for the Light through the Pouring Rain, Kevin Cummins, Faber & Faber, £21.

Manchester

Part of the Pevsner Architectural Guides series, this book covers both historical and recent buildings and development. It can be a little dry but for historical depth it’s hard to beat. Manchester (Pevsner Architectural Guides), Claire Hartwell, £9.99

Vurt

This isn’t a guidebook to Manchester, it is a work of fiction by the sci-fi writer, Jeff Noon. And it’s not even set in the ‘real’ Manchester but an alternate version of Manchester, one where society has been altered by vurt, a hallucinogenic drug and shared alternate reality that somehow filters through into real life. In the novel, the protagonist Scribble goes on a shared hallucinogenic trip with his sister, Desdemona, but when he wakes up she’s been replaced by an amorphous blob. The plot follows Scribble as he tries to find Desdemona. The book won the 1994 Arthur C Clarke Award. Read it and you’ll never see Manchester in quite the same light again. Vurt, Jeff Noon, Ringpull.