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In 1757 there was the first-ever recorded cotton auction in Liverpool. By 1771, cotton was imported through Glasgow. This rapidly replaced the weaving of local wool and linen in Lancshire and the Clyde valley, because the damper climate was more suitable for cotton-spinning. Raw materials were streaming into our region's ports from the colonies. And shipbuilding was keeping pace with new technology. Glasgow, in particular, would use its mercantile base and its education system to forge itself into a world centre of expertise in engines and metal structures, leading to a pre-eminence in power station, locomotive and ship-building that lasted until the 1970's.
The Industrial Revolution was up and running. All that was missing was a supply of plentiful “hands” to work in the “mills”. Clearances and enclosures of common land helped, the people moved out and the sheep moved in. Agriculture increased as kitchen gardens were abandoned and commons enclosed. Monoculture brought about famine and further displacement. Those who did not seek a new life in the colonies were pushed into the cities.
Some artisan families rebelled against the future, seeing that work and livelihood was being removed from home and family. In the name of an early activist, Ned Ludd, they smashed mechanical “frame” looms in factories across West Yorkshire and Lancashire, particularly those owned by the new class of “free market” capitalists. There was a ruthless response from the government, as there would be a few years later in 1819, at St Peters Field in Manchester, near where the civic buildings stand today. Over 50,000 people had gathered at a political meeting to call for the right to vote at parliamentary elections. In “dispersing” the crowd, the cavalry managed to kill 18 people and injure hundreds of others, including women and children. King Ludd would have to give way to King Cotton and King Coal.
Social struggles continued, but nothing could stop the growth of cities. Industry was becoming widespread but concentrated in great powerhouses that the world had never seen or experienced before. Manchester's population doubled between 1801 and 1821 and nearly doubled again in the next twenty years, reaching half a million people by 1881. At the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, our cities were the size of ordinary towns today. Fifty years later they were almost unimaginable, whether looking forward or, like us, looking back. There was little thought and attention to the quality of life for most of those unfortunate people who were living in “third world” slums of disgusting deprivation. Concerned observers such as Mary Gaskell and Friedrich Engels have written extensively of their experiences, sometimes in distressing detail. It would take the “city fathers” some time to react, although the emergence of Victorian civic pride would begin to make the cities habitable.