Manchester was the village that exploded in the 19th century to become one of the world's first industrial cities. At that time most people in the world lived and worked with plants and animals in small agricultural communities. Manchester showed how people could live a different kind of life, centered on manufacture in large communities where the only role of plants and animals was to provide some of the raw materials for industry: cotton, wood, leather, glue etc. Marx and Engels saw the squalor of Manchester and the alienation engendered by this new way of working and living. Nevertheless they decided that the capitalist class had rescued the rest of us from "the idiocy of rural life" and had no thoughts that we would return to any kind of rural idyll. "The iron laws of historical necessity" would carry us forward to another kind of utopia where technology would liberate us all from the messy business of working with the natural world and its products. We may have made that transition, but not by the way that the socialist patriarchs predicted for us.

The industrial base of 19th century Manchester is gone. Relics of the industrial age are now exhibits in the Museum of Science and Industry. Rails carried the human and natural resources and the products of the industrial revolution over land. The world's oldest passenger railway station is now home to the museum.

Why are we so intrigued and by the machinery of the industrial revolution? Why does it evoke nostalgia? I asked these questions again on seeing steam locomotives preserved alongside horticultural displays in East Anglia (and I will come back to that). There is something organic in the linkages and movement of this old technology that is missing from the "black boxes" of our post-industrial world.

Manchester may be past its prime as a center of manufacturing industry, many cities may have overtaken it in size and prosperity, but it is now home to Urbis, "a new kind of museum exploring life in different cities of the world".

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