£6 or pay what you can via donation + booking fee. Book here.

Brian Groom will talk to Helen Nugent on his new book, Made in Manchester, a rich and vivid history of Britain's second city through the people who have made it. Books will be available to buy on the night.

Made in Manchester is the tale of England’s second city; a metropolis that exported industry and commerce to all others and whose culture is celebrated globally. Like Brian Groom’s bestselling Northerners, this definitive history expertly combines pacey narrative with vividly drawn portraits.

Manchester was the ‘shock city’ of the Industrial Revolution. Visitors arrived from foreign lands, who saw in it a foretaste of the world’s future. But no one knew whether the upheaval would lead to prosperity or starvation. ‘From this filthy sewer pure gold flows,’ wrote French social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville.

It was a hotbed of politics too. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 is immortalised in British folklore. The city was a centre for radical movements such as Chartism, yet also spawned the employer-led Anti-Corn Law League, which made free trade Britain’s economic orthodoxy. It became the centre of the global cotton industry and a pioneer in engineering. But Made in Manchester will also tell the untold story of the pre-industrial age: Manchester’s Roman fort was manned by soldiers from across the empire, prefiguring the cosmopolitanism of the present day.

We meet the scientists who produced the world’s first stored-program computer; industrialists who laid the foundation of modern mass production; campaigners like Emmeline Pankhurst; writers Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Burgess; composers like Peter Maxwell Davies; and artists such as L.S. Lowry. Manchester’s music scene produced iconic bands including Joy Division and Oasis.

Made in Manchester will tackle the city’s sometimes spiky relations with its neighbours and its reputation for arrogance, asking whether the city’s inhabitants have a definable character. And it will ask whether Manchester, through economic decline and recent recovery, has lived up to its early promise, and whether it can still do so today.

Biography

Brian Groom is a journalist and one of the foremost experts on British regional and national affairs. His career was spent mainly at the Financial Times, where he did many of the top writing and editing jobs. He is also a former editor of Scotland on Sunday, which he launched as deputy editor and which won many awards. Originally from Stretford, Lancashire (now part of Greater Manchester), he returned to live in the north – in Saddleworth, south Pennines – in 2015.

Helen Nugent is a journalist and editor and founder of Northern Soul.