Tag Archive: Manchester

1. 

   John Dee and the Tudor College

   At around midday on 15 February 1596, following an arduous journey by road and water, John Dee arrived in Tudor Manchester. Five days later, he was installed in a (presumably...

   13th December 2025 • Read more

2. 

   Dr Dee: From Mortlake to Manchester

   On 8 September 1597, the famed Renaissance polymath John Dee wrote to his friend, Sir Edward Dyer, to complain about the ‘tymes of very great dearth here … I can...

   13th November 2025 • Read more

3. 

   The Bards of Cottonopolis: Poetry and the Labouring Class

   Grey and bustling, Manchester emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the first industrial city, churning out cotton through its steam mills and the toil of the labouring class...

   22nd September 2025 • Read more

4. 

   The Manchester Woman: Mrs Isabella Linnæus Banks

   One member of the Sun Inn Group of poets who met at Poets’ Corner, who is now among the most famous but was little-known at the time, was Mrs Isabella...

   20th August 2025 • Read more

5. 

   ‘The Peaceful, the Pure, the Victorious Pen!’: The Sun Inn Group

   During the nineteenth century, Manchester was one of the most written-about cities globally; it was famously the subject of Percy Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written following the Peterloo Massacre...

   11th July 2025 • Read more

6. 

   Poets’ Corner: Industry and Identity

   ‘Near to the gates of Chetham College, in Long Millgate, stands one of those ancient and picturesque houses, which occasionally start to view like spectres of a bygone age, but...

   6th June 2025 • Read more

7. 

   Contingency Planning and the Wartime Library

   On Friday 4 November 1938, the Library Committee of Chetham’s Library assembled—perhaps in the library’s Reading Room—as Chetham’s Librarian prepared to address them. The weather in Manchester that day was...

   13th March 2025 • Read more