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St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park is a public park to the immediate northeast of Manchester city centre, in North West England. Located on a slope between the River Irk and Rochdale Road occupies an area of acres (3 ha), but features in the formative history of Manchester. It was once an affluent suburb of Manchester, until the 19th-century Industrial Revolution altered the social standing of the area and introduced poverty and disease. Regeneration of the park in the 2000s has however modified the area and created a gateway into the Irk Valley.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.irkvalley.info/sites/stmichaels.html )〕 == History == St Michael and All Angels' church was built in 1788 by Humphrey Owen, to seat just over a thousand people. Its foundation stone was laid on 20 May 1788 and it was consecrated on 23 July 1789. Almost twenty years later, a letter appeared in the ''Manchester Guardian'' declaring "Why one of the ugliest churches in Manchester situated in one of the most crowded and notorious parts of the City, should have so long enjoyed the pleasant sounding name 'St Michael's, Angel Meadow' is beyond understanding".〔Extract from ''North and East Manchester'' article, December 28, 1808〕 The land adjacent to the church became the largest cemetery in Manchester, used for the interment of those who had no family place of burial or were too poor to afford a proper funeral. The population density of Angel Meadow in the mid-19th century was in excess of 350 per acre, and as social and living conditions worsened some resorted to digging up the cemetery and selling its soil as fertilizer to nearby farmers. The situation became so bad that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1855 to cover up graveyards with flagstones, hence the name, St Michael's Flags. In 1844, the Oldham Road terminus of the Manchester–Leeds Railway was abandoned and the line extended through Collyhurst to a new link station at Hunts Bank – the first Victoria Station. A railway viaduct traversed Angel Meadow, whilst the obnoxious smells from the Irk and Irwell and the Gould street gas works darkened the landscape. Ragged schools, such as Charter Street and Sharp Street, and other institutes for abandoned, destitute and neglected children, flourished in the area: Alexis de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian, best known for his ''Democracy in America'' (two volumes: 1835 and 1840) and ''The Old Regime and the Revolution'' (1856). In both these works he explored the effects of the rising inequalities in social conditions on the individual and the state in western societies. He visited Manchester in 1835, describing it in his work of the same year Journeys to England And Ireland. Friedrich Engels was born in 1820 as the son of a successful German industrialist. As a young man his father sent him to England to help manage his cotton-factory in Salford. Engels was shocked by the poverty in the city and began writing an account that was published as the ''Condition of the Working Classes in England'' (1844). His account includes a graphic description of the pauper burial ground at St. Michael's Flags. Engels later collaborated with Karl Marx, which famously resulted in the writing of the Communist Manifesto. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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