Including
Domestic Services in Greater Manchester, Lancashire and the NorthWest
Region
Manchester,
Lancashire and the NorthWest Region boast a very rich and diverse range
of industry and manufacturing and in many ways the region has long held
a position as a leading workshop for the United Kingdom. Since its emergence
as a first city of the Industrial
Revolution, in the eighteenth century, and its pre-eminence in the
manufacture and processing of textiles through its spinning and weaving
of cotton in the nineteenth, it has ranked as a major industrial base
for the country. It is ideally placed for the transhipment of raw materials
inwards and finished products outwards by its complex patchwork of interconnected
motorways, a major international airport
with a World Freight Centre and its main line west coast railway terminating
at 2 major rail stations.
In earlier days the city had its revolutionary canals, including the
very first, the Bridgewater Canal
which brought coal into Manchester city centre, and later, the great
Manchester Ship Canal,
linking directly to Liverpool
and to the oceans of the world. The manufacturing industries in Manchester,
along with a national trend throughout Britain, saw a rapid decline
in the 20th and early 21st centuries, mainly due to the emergence of
more competitive far eastern producers. However, despite Manchester's
old cotton industries having by now all but disappeared, the region
has to a great extent reinvented itself, discovering new outlets for
its enterprise, and still boasts many important and active areas of
industry and manufacturing.
