The Manchester printA Manchester print in a black frame, on a rust-red brick wall, in flat grey daylight.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Manchester print, drawn from the real map

53.4800°N / 2.2500°W · United Kingdom

Manchester has no edge: no coast, no ridge, no wall, and the city simply continues into the next one. What organises it instead is convergence.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Manchester print

What the map shows

A star of roads with no rim, and one line heading west

Look at the radial pattern before anything else. Roads arrive from every compass point and meet in a knot no bigger than a coin, ringed by an inner motorway. Nothing on this sheet grew around a river or against a hill. It grew around a decision to be the place everything else leads to, and the drawing says so plainly. Salford, on the far bank of the Irwell, is not a suburb but a separate city, and you will not find the line between them: on a plan there is nothing to see.

Read on

The straight water going west is the point of the whole thing. Manchester is sixty kilometres from the sea, so it dug a canal wide enough for ocean ships and made itself a port. And the knot the roads converge on is a place called Castlefield, a few hundred metres across, where a Roman fort, the canal that started the industrial waterways, and the world’s first railway station all sit on top of one another. At this distance that place is a dot. It is worth knowing that the dot is the reason for everything around it.

Compose your own

What suits Manchester

The palette

A brick city wants a warm ground, red-brown through to rust, and at this scale the ground is most of the sheet, so that choice decides the print. Keep your darkest value for the water, because the water is the only line here with an argument: the canals straight and deliberate, the rivers thin and half-hidden. Mark the outer motorway ring once, in a light grey, purely to give the conurbation its scale. Resist adding green; there is little of it, and inventing some would soften exactly what makes this drawing severe.

The framing

Vertical, and pulled well back, because the subject is the absence of an edge and you cannot show an absence up close. Come in and you get a handsome dense centre that could be any northern city, and you lose both the star of roads and the canal leaving for the sea. There is a second, much tighter print available here if you want it: Castlefield alone, where three world firsts overlap within a few hundred metres. That is a different poster, and a good one, but it is a poster of a place rather than of a city.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A road you came in on, a canal, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Manchester into your plan of Manchester.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

79It began on a spur between two rivers

In AD 79 the Romans built the fort of Mamucium on a rock spur protected by the Irwell and the Medlock, on the ground now called Castlefield. It is the first documented settlement here, and the medieval town later moved about a kilometre to the north-east, which is why the oldest place on the map is not quite the centre of it. The rivers that made the site defensible are the same ones that would later be put to work, and then largely covered over.

1761A canal was cut to carry coal, and it changed the price of everything

Between 1758 and 1761 James Brindley built a canal for the Duke of Bridgewater to bring coal from the mines at Worsley into Manchester. It reached its wharf at Castlefield in 1765, and its effect was immediate: the price of coal in the city fell by half. That is the whole logic of this map in one sentence. Manchester did not wait for a natural advantage, it built one, and then went on building until the water did what it was told.

1894An inland city gave itself a sea port

Work began in 1887, and the Manchester Ship Canal opened to navigation on 1 January 1894, with Queen Victoria inaugurating it on 21 May. Thirty-six miles of canal, wide enough for ocean-going ships, made a city sixty kilometres from the sea into one of Britain’s great ports, the third busiest at its height. On the way, at Barton, the older Bridgewater Canal had to cross it: the answer was a swing aqueduct, still the only one in the world, which pivots while remaining full of water.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Manchester

The road you always arrived by, the bridge where one city became another without telling you, the water you walked beside without knowing where it went. The convergence is the same for everyone. The direction you came from is not.

Compose my Manchester print