The conservation area which bears its name is bounded by the River Irwell, Quay Street, Deansgate and Chester Road.

[6] A Roman fort (castra), Mamucium or Mancunium was established in what is now Castlefield around AD 79 near a crossing place on the River Medlock.

[7] It was erected as a series of fortifications established by Gnaeus Julius Agricola during his campaign against the Brigantes, who were the Celtic tribe in control of most of northern England.

[17] A house and park here became the home of the Mosley family in 1601 but, in 1642, after being used by Lord Strange as a royalist headquarters during the Siege of Manchester, it was burned down by parliamentarians.

[17] The River Irwell was made navigable in 1720s, leading to the construction of a quay in the area for loading and unloading of goods (vessels of up to 50 tons could dock here and ply between Manchester and Liverpool).

In the nineteenth century the warehouses assumed other functions such as trans-shipment which involved receiving trains or barges, and reassembling their loads to be shipped to other destinations.

The railway complex in Liverpool Road was sold to a conservation group for a nominal £1 and became the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.

In 2008 it was reported that ITV were considering re-opening the tour as the company is searching for new forms of revenue to restore growth.

Planning permission to turn the empty Jackson's Wharf building into a modern five-storey block of flats by the Peel Group was rejected for a second time in 2008.

[24] In 1996 an architectural design competition was launched to create Timber Wharf by developers Urban Splash and RIBA Competitions to design a new housing type capable of being mass-produced, using modern building techniques on a realistic budget to challenge the preconceived notions of volume house building.

This can be seen in the exposed river cliffs around the Castlefield basin, and provides a solid foundation for multistorey buildings and also an easily workable rock for cutting culverts and tunnels.

The 1848 OS large scale map shows the original course as following the line of the canal as far as the coal wharf (site of the Giant's Basin).

Most of the navigation was abandoned in the 1890s, with the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal but a deep water channel was maintained up to the Woden Street footbridge.

Power to drive machinery was also derived from water but this needed fast-flowing streams where a head could be built up to turn the waterwheels.

The actual river was culverted under the basin and emerged by Potato Wharf, then flowed into the Irwell at Hulme Locks.

The Manchester and Salford Junction Canal, 1837, was cut from the Rochdale under the city to provide the link with the Irwell at Quay street.

These canals did not have the capacity to take boats larger than 1.4 m wide, so trans-shipment to oceangoing vessels was needed at a point outside the city.

This was built with[clarification needed] There was no available water to drive the hoists, so for the first year they were manual, but in 1832 they were powered by a small steam engine.

[39] The central one in the group of three southwest of Deansgate Station is the high-level iron truss girder viaduct of 1877 built for the Cheshire Lines Committee by the Midland Railway.

It uses a brick arch to cross the Staffordshire arm of the basin, before passing under the later Cornbrook and Great Northern viaduct and intersected with the then main line to Altrincham at a point about 300m west of Knott Mill Station.

[44] A couple of modern but traditional looking cast iron clad steel footbridges built by Marsh Bros Engineers, Bakewell 1990 have been thrown over some arms.

[48] The Liverpool Road railway station complex is significant as it was here that the passenger terminus was invented, and concepts such as separate facilities for the rich and the poor first appear here.

[49] In 1844 there were six railway lines connecting the world to Manchester, and Léon Faucher[50] commented that there were 15 or 16 seats of industry that formed this great constellation.

The Liverpool Road goods depot closed 8 September 1975, and the GMC made a survey of the site and it became the North Western Museum of Science and Industry in 1978.

The Corporation determined that Castlefield should be revitalised by strengthening the tourism base, consolidating and supporting business activity and establishing a vibrant residential community.

The imaginative and sensitive conservation and enhancement of the listed buildings, canals, viaducts and spaces, was to be achieved with high standards of urban design.

One organisation to benefit was Jim Ramsbottom's, Castlefield Estates company, who initiated several significant development projects, including Eastgate, Merchants Warehouse and Dukes 92.

Manchester City Council have recently encouraged high quality new developments to accompany the converted warehouses and enhance the conservation area.

[54] However, key sites remain to be completed, and Ian Simpson's proposals for a massive eight-storey block of apartments at Jackson's Wharf, has twice been rejected by the City Council reflecting vociferous local objections.

Brutal Euroboxes, with neither imagination nor taste to ameliorate them, were thrown up piecemeal in one of the worst cases of planning blight I can think of, so that now Manchester looks like a city designed by a schizophrenic drunk with attention deficiency disorder.