Manchester’s Mechanics’ Institution, established in 1824, has during the past two hundred years been co-opted into narratives increasingly remote from the essence of its foundations. A substantial body of literature has evaluated the Mechanics’ Institution with a focus on ‘social control’, and has routinely privileged the history of ‘science’, narrowly conceived. Such histories have tended to conclude the Mechanics’ Institution ‘failed’. Detailed archival study, focused on the first ten years of the Mechanics’ Institution’s existence, tells a different story. This article places the foundation and early years of this institution within the story of Manchester and the broader history of working-class education. It explores some of the tensions and concerns underpinning its establishment, in particular the impact of the Peterloo Massacre, on Manchester’s Liberal nonconformist leadership. It then traces a rapid movement from fear and distrust between different elements of Manchester’s industrial society towards an environment where deeper levels of mutual support and understanding became possible.
The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) was created for the advancement of technical education in post-war Britain. Born of an existing technical college, fondly known as ‘the Tech’, UMIST represented optimism and Manchester’s prominent position in the ‘white heat’ epoch. Historians have recognised the political and personal role of the first principal, Vivian Bowden, in the expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s metropolitan and intellectual landscapes. Alongside colleagues and councillors, Bowden selectively harnessed Manchester’s scientific reputation and industrial heritage to forge the future. The purpose of this article is to contextualise this and understand how historical narratives and acts of commemoration aided the rapid expansion of UMIST in Manchester’s educational and civic realms. Considering the relationship of key actors with concepts of the past, present and future of technology underlines the significance of attitudes towards ‘the Tech’ in this process.
This article explores some overlooked aspects of the University of Manchester’s efforts in the 1930s to support Lancashire’s industry and commerce. Two examples are considered: ‘realistic economic research’ conducted by the Economics Research Section into Lancashire’s post-war economic problems, and the reintroduction of Chinese studies aimed at supporting Lancashire cotton merchants. While the successes of both endeavours were limited, the article concludes by briefly considering the legacy of such efforts on the university’s research philosophy, particularly through the introduction of the Simon Fund in 1944.
This article explores in what ways and to what extent it is possible to talk about ‘higher learning’ and ‘higher education’ in Manchester before 1824, the date formally chosen by the University of Manchester to mark its foundation. It considers diverse sites and institutions, revealing a complex, interconnected web of knowledge spaces – dissenting academies, teaching hospitals, learned societies, independent libraries and individual initiatives – which complicate existing narratives of the development of higher education in the city that usually focus on the origins of the university. In the early nineteenth century, with Manchester rapidly becoming the ‘world’s first industrial city’, we see emerging at the same time a vibrant urban educational landscape, with no parallel in the British Isles at that time. 1 In contrast to England’s ancient universities which remained, for the most part, closed and private entities until the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester’s educational culture was self-consciously diffused, civic and participatory, strongly influenced by the city’s prominent dissenting communities. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, Manchester’s Unitarians, in particular, sought to shape the city’s educational culture according to the Enlightenment ideal of polite learning as a public endeavour. While civic participatory models have been foregrounded by historians of knowledge and ideas in recent years, this article considers, for the first time, how such models influenced the history of educational cultures in Manchester.
This article demonstrates that the ‘extension’ of Owens College, Manchester – the ancestor of the University of Manchester – in 1870–73 represents an important and misunderstood moment in the history of English civic universities. The new model of governance instituted by the extension movement subsequently became normative for the civic universities, and remained largely in place throughout the twentieth century. The reformers set out to devise a model of public accountability appropriate for a public institution as distinct from a private trust. The article centres on the relationship between James Bryce and the lay leaders of the extension movement, and explores the connections between the Owens College reform, the Taunton Commission’s inquiry into the endowed grammar schools, and contests over the control of three major educational foundations in Manchester (Chetham’s Hospital, Manchester Grammar School and Hulme’s Charity).
Following its charter of 1956, the Manchester Municipal College of Technology appointed a new principal, who oversaw the rapid expansion of the campus. The development of a suite of new buildings, on one of the city’s most polluted and derelict tracts, required cooperation between the College, the Victoria University of Manchester, the Manchester Corporation, and a host of central government ministries. This initiative was driven by the recognition that technology and technological education were vital tools in the retention of Britain’s global influence. Manchester was identified for the accelerated growth of higher technological education due to its history of engineering, manufacturing and the development of commercial computing. Founded on archival sources, this article explores the complex relationships between statecraft, Whitehall policy, municipal governance and space. Using the manifestation of urban planning and architecture, it argues that the ‘Warfare State’ had influence beyond overt military programmes, which informed certain civic and municipal local enterprise with objectives other than rearmament, such as education, employment and economic recovery.
The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.