Collection: Local Studies-Reference

Shedding light on the history of motoring in the northwest of England at the turn of the century, 'The Cheshire Motor Vehicle Registrations, 1908-11', edited by Craig Horner, publishes one of the very few documentary sources available for the study of car ownership before the First World War. In ...

Bel's joined the Manchester office of a big national paper from her award-winning podcast. There are three of them - Bel, her relentlessly ambitious colleague Aaron, and a new intern. And when the intern turns out to be a 30-something man called Connor, he and Bel get off on totally the wrong foo...

Eva's book is part of the My Voice Project, a collection of firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors and refugees from Nazi persecution who settled in the UK. Eva appears in some of the photographs that are the only visual evidence of the mass murder at Auschwitz. After the war, she moved to Man...

A selection of poems by Henry Normal, the founder of the Manchester Poetry Festival and co-founder of the Nottingham Poetry Festival.

Manchester, 1940: The minute war was declared, best friends Sally and Deborah volunteered for the home guard, willing to do anything to help their boys fighting overseas. An Auxiliary Fire Service girl by night, Sally ends up stationed at the salvage depot by day. Working amidst the scrap metal a...

Manchester, 1941. Kitty learned early on in her marriage that her husband, Bill Dunbar, isn't reliable with money. So when they inherit the Dunbar family hotel at the start of the war, she's hopeful that their financial worries are over - until the bailiffs turn up! With Bill away fighting, it's ...

Manchester is steeped in railway history going back almost 200 years to the opening of Liverpool Road station in September 1830. The line from Liverpool was widely regarded as the first ever inter-city railway in the world. The railway network around the city greatly expanded in the second half o...