Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. In 2009, it was the seventh-most populous local authority district in England. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas; the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester and had an estimated population of 2,600,100. The Greater Manchester Urban Area a population of 2,240,230, and the Larger Urban Zone around Manchester are the second-most-populous in the UK, had an estimated population in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2,539,100.

Manchester is situated in the south-central part of North West England, fringed by the Cheshire Plain to the south and the Pennines to the north and east. Historically, most of the city was a part of Lancashire, although areas south of the River Mersey were in Cheshire.

Throughout the Middle Ages Manchester remained a manorial township, but began expanding "at an astonishing rate" around the turn of the 19th century as part of a process of unplanned urbanisation brought on by a boom in textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. The urbanisation of Manchester largely coincided with the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian era, resulting in it becoming the world's first industrialised city. As the result of an early-19th century factory building boom, Manchester was transformed from a township into a major mill town, borough and was later granted honorific city status in 1853.