This new study examines how nineteenth-century industrial Lancashire became a leading national and international art centre. By the end of the century almost every major town possessed an art gallery, while Lancashire art schools and artists were recognised at home and abroad. The book documents the remarkable rise of visual art across the county, along with the rise of the commercial and professional classes who supported it. It examines how Lancashire looked to great civilisations of the past for inspiration while also embracing new industrial technologies and distinctively modern art movements. This volume will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the new industrial society of the nineteenth century, from art lovers and collectors to urban and social historians.

A bicentennial celebration of brilliant thinkers from The University of Manchester's history. The year 2024 marks two centuries since the establishment of The University of Manchester in its earliest form. The first of England’s civic universities, Manchester has been home and host to a huge number of influential thinkers and generated world-changing ideas. This book presents a rich account of the remarkable contribution that people associated with The University of Manchester have made to human knowledge. A who’s who of Manchester greats, it presents fascinating snapshots of pioneering artists, scholars and scientists, from the poet and activist Eva Gore-Booth to the economist Arthur Lewis, the computer scientist Alan Turing and the physicist Brian Cox.

A brilliant exposition of how the Bible and classical antiquity are central to the formation of Victorian self-understanding.

‘Bill Cooke is to be congratulated on his extensive and knowledgeable account of Warrington’s history.’ – Harry Wells, author of Medieval Warrington In 2015 Warrington was named by the Royal Society of Arts as the ‘least culturally alive town in England’. But was this a fair evaluation? In his new book, Bill Cooke offers a dramatic reexamination of the town. Looking back on its fascinating history dating back to the Romans, The Story of Warrington demonstrates an extensive and diverse cultural history. Should Warrington apologise for the person who supported Richard III against the Princes in the Tower? Why was Warrington thought of as the Athens of the North? What role did the town play in the Industrial Revolution and the slave trade? How did Warrington help win the Cold War? With insights into these questions and more, readers are presented with the other side of the argument and learn key facts about the history of this British town.

In this innovative contribution to the field of environmental history, Stephen Mosley explores the devastating human and environmental costs of smoke pollution in the world’s first industrial city.

Cities and Cultures is a critical account of the relations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce and which in turn shape them. The book questions received ideas of what constitutes a city's culture through case studies in which different kinds of culture - the arts, cultural institutions and heritage, distinctive ways of life - are seen to be differently used in or affected by the development of particular cities. The book does not mask the complexity of this, but explains it in ways accessible for undergraduates. The book begins with introductory chapters on the concepts of a city and a culture (the latter in the anthropological sense as well as denoting the arts), citing cases from modern literature. The book then moves from a critical account of cultural production in a metropolitan setting to the idea that a city, too, is produced through the characteristic ways of life of its inhabitants. The cultural industries are scrutinised for their relation to such cultures as well as to city marketing, and attention is given to the European Cities of Culture initiative, and to the hybridity of contemporary urban cultures in a period of globalisation and migration. In its penultimate chapter the book looks at incidental cultural forms and cultural means to identify formation; and in its final chapter, examines the permeability of urban cultures and cultural forms. Sources are introduced, positions clarified and contrasted, and notes given for selective further reading. Playing on the two meanings of culture, Miles takes an unique approach by relating arguments around these meanings to specific cases of urban development today. The book includes both critical comment on a range of literatures - being a truly inter-disciplinary study - and the outcome of the author's field research into urban cultures.

An overdue study of a groundbreaking event, this is the first book-length examination of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. Intended to rehabilitate Manchester's image at a heady time of economic prosperity, the Exhibition became a touchstone for aesthetic, social, and economic issues of the mid-nineteenth century. Reverberations of this moment can be followed to the present day in the discipline of art history and its practice in public museums of Europe and America. Highlighting the tension between art and commerce, philanthropy and profit, the book examines the Exhibition's organization and the presentation of the works of art in the purpose-built Art Treasures Palace. Pergam places the Exhibition in the context of contemporary debates about museum architecture and display. With an analysis of the reception of both "Ancient" and "Modern" paintings, the book questions the function of exhibitions in the construction of an art historical canon. The book also provides an essential reference tool: a compiled list of all of the paintings exhibited in 1857 that are now in public collections throughout the world, with an analysis of the collecting trends manifest in their provenance.