Exchange is a process, and it is two buildings in Manchester. These are the Cotton Exchange building, now the Royal Exchange Theatre, and the Corn Exchange. As well as being monuments to capitalism, the Cotton Exchange was tied up with overseas slavery, particularly in the American South. The Corn Exchange is associated with more localised struggles for living standards. ‘Exchange’ was a general term before Manchester capitalism, but it emerges from the other side of nineteenth-century industrialism – which Manchester drove – as a markedly different thing. Global, globalising and highly divisive, this entry explores the tensions within the term ‘exchange’ in the city of Manchester.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.