Weather Forecast in Eccles City

Eccles (/ˈɛkəlz/; pop. 36,600) is a town in the City of Salford in Greater Manchester, England. It is 2.7 miles (4.3 km) west of Salford and 3.7 miles (6.0 km) west of Manchester city centre, and occupies sloping ground between the M602 motorway (to the north) and the Manchester Ship Canal (to the south). The town's landscape is dominated by residential tower blocks, forming a stark contrast with the surrounding Victorian terraced housing.

Historically a part of Lancashire, Eccles grew up around the 13th-century Parish Church of St Mary. Evidence of pre-historic human settlement has been discovered locally but the area was predominantly agricultural until the Industrial Revolution, when a textile industry was established in the town. The arrival of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world's first passenger railway, led to the town's expansion along the route of the track linking those two cities; as of 2009 Salford City Council is bidding for the railway to be included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites. Eccles was not immune to the general 20th-century decline of the United Kingdom's textile industry. Parts of Eccles are among the worst 20% for child poverty in the United Kingdom, and the unemployment rate is slightly above the national average.

Eccles cakes, made from flaky pastry, butter, nutmeg, candied peel, sugar and currants, were first produced and sold in the town in 1793, and are now exported across the world. Eccles' other claim to fame is its involvement in one of the world's first railway accidents when in 1830 William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was seriously injured by an approaching locomotive. He was taken to the vicarage in Eccles for treatment, but died of his injuries.