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,
as shown below:
Listed
Alphabetically:
