Manchester is 189 miles from London; its population is 316,213. The city stands partly on a plain, and partly in the valley of the Irwell. The extensive circumjacent tract as seen from the nearest range of hills looks not a little charming, but does so, not from its proper character as a landscape but from its profusion of groves, villas, mansions, factories, and towns, with Manchester in the centre, and Stockport, Ashton, Oldhani, Bolton, Bury, and Middleton in the distances. A stranger approaching the city, by road or by railway, bids farewell to the amenities of open scenery, makes speedy acquaintance with the smoke and noise of factories, sees the very sky changing from a clear to a greyish blue, becomes surrounded with crowded indications of traffic and manufacture, and passes at last into what seems almost a chaos of mills and warehouses.

Great improvements have for many years been in progress in the city. Outskirts which were straggling, unsightly, or rural, are now covered with ornamental suburbs. The very field of the great disastrous public meeting of 1819 is now graced with one of the chief and most ornate of the public buildings. Market Street was, so late as about 1827, a mere disagreeable lane, only wide enough to admit one ordinary sized vehicle, but is now for spaciousness and splendour, the first street in the city.

The town hall was erected in 1824, at a cost of nearly £40,000. It is in the lonic style, copied from the temple of Erecthcus at Athens and is surmounted by a dome copied from the octagonal tower of Adronicus or the Tower of the Winds.

The railway stations are Victoria Station, at Hunts Bank, for the western and northern lines of the North Western Railway; London Road Station for the southern lines of the North Western; Oxford Road Station; and New Bailey Street Station in Salford. Cotton manufacture, as of old, is still the staple manufacture of industry. The increase of it since the latter part of the last century has been stupendous. The quantity of cotton imported, about the end of last century did not exceed two million Ibs per year; while the quantity imported in 1860 amounted to 1,390,938,752 Ibs. The factories of various kinds in the city in 1857 comprised 96 cotton mills, 10 silk mills, 6 calico printing works, 35 dye works, 1 worsted mill, 11 hat manufactories, 16 smallware manufactories, 61 machine making establishments, 55 foundries, 4 leadworks, 4 paper-mills, 52 saw-mills, 12 corn-mills, and 1,214 miscellaneous establishments; they produced goods for storage in 1,743 warehouses.
JOHN TALLIS