Hidden Histories

To my general astonishment, I haven't crossed the Irwell for a month - a bit over two weeks on holiday, and then very much Salford and home  based with excursions to Stockport and Trafford.

But today was very much about Manchester, and fascinating seeing what has changed in four weeks.

Work on St Peter's Square is moving forward rapidly. The new metrolink station is coming on, and I think I've read is set to be completed by August. The base of the St Peter's Cross is now in (just in front of the digger, on the right in this blip) - it sits on the site of St Peter's Church, demolished at the beginning of the last century.

There is a Manchester Histories festival going on, all of which I am missing, but which is a great idea. This place is the location of one of the seminal events in Manchester's history - in 1819 Henry Hunt spoke in front of a large crowd (60,000 plus), gathered peacefully, in what was then St Peter's Fields, to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. The authorities were alarmed, and sent in the cavalry, resulting in many deaths and even more injuries.  The Peterloo Massacre. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars were still recent, and Manchester had been industrialising for 30 plus years (the world's first industrial city) so a time when the old order was trying to keep the lid on social change. Shelley's great poem, The Mask of Anarchy, was one of the legacies of this fractious period in our history - which is strangely not commemorated by anything too obvious, although I suspect that may change by 2019.