To look at Lancashire is to look at the oldest industrial society in the world and at the landscapes of L. S. Lowry. ‘Do you know Burnley?’ asked H. M. Hyndman. ‘If not, don't.’ He recalled the impression that this not untypical cotton town made upon him: ‘There it lay in the hollow, one hideous Malebolge of carbon-laden fog and smoke, the factory chimneys rising up above the mass of thick cloud like stakes upon which, as I said to my companion, successive generations of the workers and their children had been impaled.’ Charles Rowley, who founded the Ancoats Brotherhood in the slums of Manchester and provided a prototype for Toynbee Hall, declared that in Lancashire and the West Riding, ‘we have a population of some seven millions, and no tree’, but took the view that ‘the materialistic advantage is undoubted’. Such considerations of material advantage had played a large, though not always dominant, part in moulding the political consciousness of the region.

The assertion of political rights in the north west began in the 1830s with the first redistribution of parliamentary seats and the incorporation of many newly important towns.