Alan Turing is a patron saint of Manchester, remembered as the Mancunian who won the war, invented the computer, and was all but put to death for being gay. Each myth is related to a historical story. This is not a book about the first of those stories, of Turing at Bletchley Park. But it is about the second two, which each unfolded here in Manchester, of Turing's involvement in the world's first computer and of his refusal to be cowed about his sexuality.
Manchester can be proud of Turing, but can we be proud of the city he encountered?

Jonathan Swinton has a PhD in mathematics and has worked as a mathematical biologist for thirty years, including as a Visiting Professor in the University of Oxford and as a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He has published several articles on Alan Turing's work on Fibonacci patterns, and in 2012 conceived the international citizen science project Turing's Sunflowers. This is his first book on Manchester, where he has lived, worked and loved since 2002.

Manchester is proud of Alan Turing but does it deserve to be? Dr Jonathan Swinton explores the complexity of the city that Alan Turing encountered in 1948. He goes well beyond Turing as a mathematician, to cover wire-women, Wittgenstein and the daisy. This book takes you across the city, from Hale to Moston, via the Festival of Britain and the seminar rooms and pick-up sites of the Oxford Road. It is a richly illustrated account of lives lived - and one life ended tragically early - in a post-war Manchester busy creating the computer.