In 1835, the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that Manchester was without challenge the first and greatest industrial city in the world. He meant it as a description, not a compliment. The thirty-mile radius around the city centre - what would become Greater Manchester in 1974 - had been transformed in two generations from a quiet expanse of Lancashire and Cheshire countryside into a single urban organism unlike anything that had existed before. Today, ten metropolitan boroughs - Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan - share a combined authority, an elected mayor, a tram network, and a story that runs from the Pennines to the Cheshire Plain.
Before 1974, this region was an ancient hundred of Lancashire called Salfordshire, plus portions of Cheshire (south of the Mersey) and a small slice of the West Riding of Yorkshire (Saddleworth). The Domesday Book of 1086 had surveyed it partly with Cheshire; medieval Manchester sat at the confluence of the Irk and the Irwell. By 1801 the population of Manchester and Salford together had reached about 95,000. By 1841, after four decades of explosive industrial growth, it was 400,000. Sir Patrick Geddes wrote in 1915 that another Greater London was rising in the north. In 1947 Lancashire County Council proposed reorganising into three ridings. In 1965 a draft report proposed a county based on the Manchester conurbation with nine boroughs. The acronym SELNEC - South East Lancashire, North East Cheshire - became local shorthand. It was used as the name of the area's Passenger Transport Executive from 1969 until 1974.
The Local Government Act 1972 created Greater Manchester as a metropolitan county on 1 April 1974, with the new Greater Manchester County Council already running from the previous year's elections. The boundaries were drawn smaller than the original Redcliffe-Maud recommendation, leaving out Macclesfield, Warrington, and Glossop because Cheshire County Council needed enough population to remain financially viable. Bury and Rochdale - which a 1969 report had recommended joining as a single borough, nicknamed Botchdale by the local MP Michael Fidler - were split into two. Whitworth, Wilmslow, and Poynton successfully objected to inclusion. The name Greater Manchester was adopted after public consultation, beating SELNEC, despite a vocal minority who called it an abomination and a travesty. The county council lasted only twelve years.
Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government abolished the Greater Manchester County Council on 31 March 1986, along with the other metropolitan counties and the Greater London Council. Most of its functions devolved to the ten borough councils. The Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, AGMA, was set up to continue cross-county coordination on a voluntary basis. After Greater London voted in 1998 to recreate a city-region authority with an elected mayor, pressure for the same in Manchester grew. The Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 enabled the creation of a Combined Authority, and on 1 April 2011 the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was formally established - the first of its kind in England. On 3 November 2014, the Chancellor George Osborne announced that an elected Mayor of Greater Manchester would be added from 2017, with powers over transport, housing, planning, and policing. Andy Burnham was elected the first mayor in May 2017.
Geographically, the county is bookended. The Pennines rise to the north and east - West Pennine Moors, South Pennines, and the Peak District beyond. The Cheshire Plain stretches south. Most rivers begin in the Pennines and drain to the Mersey via the Irwell. The Manchester Ship Canal, built 1887 to 1894, gave the inland city direct access to the sea by canalising the lower Mersey and Irwell. Culturally, the county claims two of England's largest football clubs - Manchester United at Old Trafford in Trafford and Manchester City at the Etihad in east Manchester - the Manchester Arena, the Lowry at Salford Quays, the BBC's MediaCity, the Royal Exchange Theatre, and a music history that runs from the Hallé Orchestra through Joy Division and Oasis. The cotton mills are gone. The chimneys mostly stand empty. But the urban fabric they built - red-brick warehouses, terraced streets, the lacework of the Metrolink tram routes - still defines what it means to live in the north of England.
Centred at 53.5025 degrees north, 2.31 degrees west, just west of Manchester city centre. Greater Manchester covers roughly 500 square miles of urban and semi-urban landscape stretching from Wigan in the west to Saddleworth Moor in the east, and from Bolton in the north to Stockport in the south. The Pennines (peaks reaching 1,500-2,000 feet) form the eastern and northern boundaries. Major airports: Manchester (EGCC) in the south, Manchester City (Barton, EGCB) in Salford, Liverpool (EGGP) 30 miles to the west. The Beetham Tower, the Etihad Stadium, Old Trafford, and the Manchester Ship Canal are key visual landmarks. Recommended viewing altitude is 3,500 to 6,000 feet AGL for overall context; respect controlled airspace boundaries around EGCC.