When Engels left Manchester for the very last time in 1870, this building was a functioning Cotton Exchange.
Look at the ceiling and you can see the stock prices, displayed from the very last day of trading.
The previous building, was known as, 'xchange'. It was the hub of the cotton industry, the largest trading hall in Europe.
The place where prices were fixed and deals were struck.
The textile products were sold as ‘Manchester goods’. Sent across the world the fabrics made the clothes worn by most people living in the world at the time.
The Manchester Exchange, had a membership of thousands of cotton merchants, who met every Tuesday and Friday, to trade their wares.
Manchester’s cotton dealers and manufacturers trading from the Exchange, earned the city the name, Cottonopolis.
To finance and promote manufacturing and trade in cotton, a banking and commercial centre grew up in the area around King Street.
The Bank of England had a branch on Upper King Street which had been operating since 1826, and on Exchange Street was Manchester’s own Stock Exchange.
From his office on Southgate St, Frederick Engels would have made the short journey, to the Exchange very often during his time at, Ermen and Engels.
In 1854 he was elected a member of the Exchange.
But that did not stop him from constantly hoping for a crash in the cotton market.
In 1851, for example, he thought a crash was imminent and wrote to Marx about one of the Ermen brothers.
'Peter Ermen is already shitting his pants when he thinks of it – and that little bullfrog is a good barometer of the state of trade.”
This gives us some idea of how much Engels despised businessmen.
A few years later, in 1857, it was the thought of economic crisis that cheered him up.
'INDEED, the Exchange is the one place where my current DULLNESS is transformed into resilience and BOUNCING.'
'On top of that, my predictions are of course always gloomy, which makes the asses doubly furious.'
Walking notes.
Walk out of St Anne's Square, cross and walk down New Cathedral St, at the side of the Marks and Spencer store, go ahead into Cathedral Gardens, in front of the Football Museum.
Go to the water fountain, on Cathedral Green.