South Lancashire

The great industrial cities of Manchester and Liverpool dominate the southern band of Lancashire. Manchester's buildings range from its little-known medieval cathedral, housing some of the finest medieval wood carving in England, to imposing factories and civic and commercial monuments, among which Waterhouse's great Gothic Town Hall is the supreme example. Liverpool's two famous twentieth-century cathedrals watch over a no less proud city, whose distinctive mixture of toughness and display appear variously at the early Victorian Albert Dock, its sumptuous contemporary St George's Hall, and the great commercial parade alongside the Mersey. Towns such as Bury and Rochdale, showing the same civic endeavour on a smaller scale, stud a landscape that rises into dramatic moorland country to the east.