Historically part of Lancashire, Cheetham was a township in the parish of Manchester and hundred of Salford.

Migrants from Pakistan and the Caribbean settled in the 1950s and 1960s, and more recently people from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Far East.

[4] The Museum of Transport in Manchester in Boyle Street, Cheetham, is part of Queen's Road bus depot.

The first element of the name comes from the Common Brittonic word that survives in modern Welsh as coed ("woodland").

[6][7]: 318 Neolithic implements have been discovered at Cheetham Hill, implying human habitation 7–10,000 years ago.

[8] Cheetham is not mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and does not appear in records until 1212, when it was documented to have been a thegnage estate comprising "a plough-land", with an annual rate of 1 mark payable by the tenant, Roger de Middleton, to King John of England.

St John Evangelist's was designed by Paley & Austin and built at the expense of Lewis Loyd.

Manchester City Council engaged contractors to exhume the remains of around 20,000 bodies to be re-interred in a mass grave in Bury.

[18] Lying within the historic county boundaries of Lancashire since the early 12th century, Cheetham anciently constituted a thegnage estate, held by tenants who paid tax to the King.

On 26 March 1896 the parish was abolished and merged with Beswick, Blackley, Bradford, Clayton, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Moston and Newton to form North Manchester.

[2] Cheetham is an electoral ward of Manchester City Council,[22] and is part of the Blackley and Broughton parliamentary constituency.

Winston Churchill was Liberal MP for the area early in his political career (some years before he re-crossed the floor to the Conservative Party).

To the north, it is bordered by Crumpsall, to the west by Broughton in Salford, to the east and the southeast by Harpurhey and Collyhurst, and by Manchester City Centre to the south.