Secret Life Of: Mark Crinson - The Smoke

‘The Smoke’, as I’ve called this presentation, comes out of my work on nineteenth-century Manchester, a book-length version of which I hope to have finished by the end of this year. Often known as the ‘first industrial city’ or ‘shock city’, Manchester’s architectural, urban and visual forms have been surprisingly little discussed. I’m interested in whether we can use them to make a similar kind of claim to the one Walter Benjamin made of Paris as the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. The engraving discussed here will open my book and be used as an introduction to its coverage and main issues. Mark Crinson, Professor of Architectural History, Birkbeck