Manchester: Red, Blue & Green all over

Manchester is a city which is synonymous with the Blue of City and the Red of United, but now Manchester is set to be Greener, too. For Manchester is to be a designated low-carbon economic area (LCEA).

The UK Trade & Investment website states that the: "Five-year retrofit programme is expected to generate £650 million for the economy, save six million tonnes of carbon and support 34,800 jobs. It will involve the installation of small-scale renewable-energy technologies and the introduction of smart meters allowing households to see how much energy they are using."

The programme will be delivered by a variety of public sector organisations, including Greater Manchester's commissions for the Environment and the New Economy and the North West Development Agency.

Manchester was the world's first industrial city, and in the nineteenth century a place where people flocked in search of work. Friedrich Engels wrote The Conditions of the Working Class in England, while he was living in Manchester for a time in the 1840s. The images conjured by reading about Engels' Manchester and other writers of the period and the stick figures in paintings by L.S. Lowry have made a deep impression in stereotyping the city often in a negative way, but so much has changed - and for the better.

Go walk about in the world's first industrial city with the Manchester: Then & Now, Walk Talk Tour. The guide is composed of commentary points (like tracks on a CD or an iTunes album). Do your bit for the environment and your waistline. Listeners will hear about a particular attraction and then receive instructions explaining how to get to the next commentary point. The tour comes with a free downloadable map for listeners to print out. To hear an audio sample from the tour please click here.

Visitors without the wherewithal to download the tour to their iPhone, iPod, mobile phone or MP3 player can hire it from the Visitor Information Centre, in the Town Hall Extension, on Lloyd Street.