The City and the Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester
Manchester is a relatively new city; born of the Industrial Revolution. It played a decisive and leading role in world textile manufacture and production in the late 18th century, a position it maintained and held until its decline in the 1960s.
Leaders of commerce, science and technology, like John Dalton and Richard Arkwright, helped create a vibrant and thriving economy - most of the nation's wealth was created in this region during Victorian times.
But it was undoubtedly textiles, and other associated trades, which dominated and created a young dynamic city, whose very symbol is the worker bee - a feature of the city's coat of arms and an emblem repeated in mosaics all over the floor of the city's Town Hall.
Manchester is one of the largest metropolitan conurbations in the United Kingdom, justly proud of its history and heritage, its culture, enterprise and its entrepreneurial spirit. In more recent times, it has had to reconfigure its traditional manufacturing base to develop thriving new technologies. It has rebuilt itself as a leading centre of modernist architecture since the terrorist bombing of the city in 1996.
This new sense of vigour and dynamism is evident in the appearance of an ever increasing number of city centre hotels, luxury apartments and self-catering accommodation as well as office space to rent.
It is a tribute to its people and planners of Manchester that the city arose again out of the ashes of this atrocity, phoenix-like, to become a thoroughly modern city - a leading light of the 21st century.