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Summary
Author: Fairbairn, W(illia)m
Title: Observations on improvements of the town of Manchester, particularly as regards the importance of blending in those improvements, the chaste and beautiful, with the ornamental and useful.
Publication: Manchester, "printed by Robert Robinson, St.Ann's Place" 1836.
Price: Sold
Reference: 10011
Full Description
8vo. 44pp, 3 litho plates. Bound with issues of The St.James's Royal Magazine for March and April 1826, and with pamphlets on "England, Ireland, and America", (1835), 40pp, lacking title leaf, and "Russia", Edinburgh, William Tait 1836, (2) + 52pp ; both these pamphlets were by Richard Cobden, but were issued under the pseudonym "A Manchester Manufacturer". Contemporary cloth. Formerly in the stock of the Weinreb firm, with acquisition code for February 1970.
A very rare pamphlet by the distinguished industrialist and mechanical engineer Sir William Fairbairn, Bart. (1789-1874), in business in Manchester from 1814 onwards. Fairbairn advocates the widening of Piccadilly, the principal street in the centre of the town, to accommodate statues of James Watt, Sir Richard Arkwright, and the Duke of Bridgewater, and the construction at one end of Piccadilly, on the site of the Royal Hotel, of a new circular Exchange building, domed and with a surrounding colonnade of the Corinthian order (this is shown in a perspective view ; there is also a street plan of central Manchester showing the proposed improvements). The Exchange building would be at the centre of a quadrant which would house a new Post Office and other buildings of utility to businessmen. Fairbairn appends a short essay jointly written by James Nasmyth and himself on "The Art of Design as applied to Steam Engine Chimnies", with an accompanying plate. What is significant is that this must be one of the very earliest publications to propose improvements to the streetscape of a town in the English provinces - Manchester was at that date not yet a city, and did not even have a Member of Parliament - and that the proposals came from Fairbairn, a rising member of Manchester's business community.