Industrial Revelation

Travelers to Manchester feel the hum of history as well as an intellectual openness to things new and challenging

- Gretchen Kelly

Talk to any Brit of a progressive persuasion and mention Manchester. You'll see them visibly soften and warm, like a New York City pretzel on a coal fire. "Oh, I love Manchester," is the standard return. For a particular type of person in the United Kingdom, Manchester is progressive Paris.

It's all there: The long and illustrious history of the Labour Movement that started in this matrix of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1800s. There's the connection to Friedrich Engels, whose father owned one of Manchester's textile works – "dark, Satanic mills," as the poet William Blake described them. Engels’ response was to sit in Manchester's famed libraries and try to work out a solution that would humanize the new 19th century realities of work and production.

There's the widow, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters whose modest home across from a hospital became the meeting place for a new movement for women seeking the vote – the Suffragettes.

There's also the legacy of the prominent progressive newspaper, The Manchester Guardian, in whose current online form, "The Guardian," news stays un-paywalled and accessible to all.

“Manchester is the city where great minds meet," says Sheona Southern, managing director of marketing Manchester. "It is a city of firsts and pioneering partnerships; where the atom was split, where Rolls met Royce, where the first programmable computer was created, where graphene was discovered, and where the first professional football league was introduced." (Of course, that’s soccer to us Yanks.)