For a relatively small island, the United Kingdom has a lot of flavour. People can tell from accents which city others come from even though these cities are neighbours. While language pulls us together, people clearly value signals of where they are local. Manchester is the second largest city in the UK. It's unplanned urbanisation was on the back of a textile boom which lead it to become the world's first industrialised city. Before industrialisation, most of us would have been 'different but rural'. The underlying sounds of our lives would have rhymed. Cities bumped up the extremes. Wealth and poverty. Boom and bust. The cities population peaked in 1931 at 766,311 (530,300 now, with 2.7 million in Greater Manchester). Manchester lost 150,000 jobs in manufacturing 1961 and 1983. Creative destruction, or just destruction, depending on whether you landed on your feet. In times of change, local is something you can cling to.
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