2023 – Page 3 – Manchester Historian

There’s an area in Manchester called Ancoats, also known as ‘Little Italy’. Between 1891 and 1901, 24,382 Italians migrated to Manchester, most of them were found living in Holborn, Saffron Hill and Hatton Garden, but Italians were usually found everywhere in Britain like Glasgow, Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham.

Manchester, the heart of evolution and the industrial revolution, including art, business, and cultures. The capital of the North. Although the weather is not very warm and welcoming, the people are!

“I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday.” The final, defiant lines of Ewan MacColl’s The Manchester Rambler are set to a jovial tune that has become a standard for English folk singers; yet one could be forgiven for not having heard it. The song, and the trespass it commemorates, occupy a somewhat niche space in English history – side-lined, along with the entire debate around land ownership and access, by ingrained and unquestioned notions of property.

160 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln sent a letter to the ‘working men of Manchester’, acknowledging their ‘sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country’. These words are now memorialised at the foot of the Lincoln statue, sculpted by George Grey Bernard, which stands in recently-remodelled Lincoln Square just off Deansgate. The historic link between Manchester and the American North is lesser known, but was a hugely significant moment in the US Civil War.

Today, Manchester’s Market Street boasts dozens of busy high-street retailers and restaurants. But once upon a time, the site was home to the Clarion Café, a powerful institution for social activists.