AKA Cottonopolis, Coketown, Madchester, The City of the Red Rose, The City of Darkness, etc.

Manchester is the largest city in Lancashire, in the North West of England. The urban sprawl around the city is known as Greater Manchester, a metropolitan county with a population of 2.7 million. It encompasses ten metropolitan boroughs: Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan, and the cities of Manchester and Salford.

Manchester is a city exploded and rebuilt, comprising the jagged skyline of 1950s towerblocks, the rising sceptres of post-2008 apartments and the glistening architecture of empty shopping malls designed to revive the economy but failing to do much beyond glinting evilly in the sunlight.

Much of Manchester city centre was bombed by the Luftwaffe, and later again by the IRA. In a fit of civic pride, the city began to rebuild, with even loftier buildings and loftier aspirations. Manchester would become, it was hoped, a second city for the UK. It would rival London once more.

Before that, it was a city of warehouses and mills, and one of the world's manufacturing hubs. Its canals ran with ink and the blood of the slave trade that fuelled the local cotton industry. Wraiths of children mutilated by the machines of the mills still linger. Vampires, of course, grew fat on such exploitation and now use the abandoned warehouses of Ancoats as havens or temporary venues for blood-fuelled raves.

But Manchester is also a city of invention and imagination. Here Alan Turing was born - the genius whose code-breaking helped win the Second World War. Writer Quentin Crisp died here in the bed of one of his fans, who had taken pity on the skin-flint older gentleman and given up his room for him. Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters fought for women's rights here. Meanwhile, the Peterloo Massacre was a key fight for civil liberty in Britain. The Anarchs have been in the city as long as the Camarilla has, and they wait for the opportune moment . . .