Our Heritage

Manchester is a city where ideas that change the world are born.

The first industrial revolution started here. John Dalton’s atomic theory, the foundation for modern-day chemistry and physics, was developed here. The world’s first programmable computer, the ‘Manchester Baby’, was built here. It's where one of the 21st century’s most valuable and important materials, Graphene, was discovered.

Today, Greater Manchester is a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, known globally for the strength of its knowledge economy.

By focusing on the city’s strengths in advanced materials and manufacturing, health innovation and life sciences, digital and creative, and green technologies, Sister will build upon Manchester’s history of scientific breakthroughs and attract global talent to the region, strengthening the city’s place on the world stage.

Sister stands on a site that has contributed significantly to Manchester’s innovation heritage. Once home to high-tech industries like printing, dyeing and manufacturing during the height of Manchester’s nineteenth-century “Cottonopolis” era, by the middle of the twentieth century the area had transformed into a global centre for computing, electronics and engineering.

In the 1950s, it was on this site that they chose to build the most technologically advanced university campus in the country, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST).

The first president of UMIST, Vivian Bowden, said that “Industry has as much to contribute to the universities as the universities have to industry.”

For almost 50 years, UMIST lived by this philosophy. And it built a reputation as one of the most important research-based universities in the world.

When UMIST joined forces with the Victoria University of Manchester in 2004 to become The University of Manchester, UMIST’s commitment to innovation through collaboration became a central tenet of the new University. And this ethos will live on at Sister for years to come.