Tampere grew rich on an 18-metre drop between two Finnish lakes
Tampere sits on a strip of land squeezed between Lake Näsijärvi and Lake Pyhäjärvi, whose surfaces differ by 18 metres. The rapids linking them, Tammerkoski, powered mills, a Scottish textile empire and eventually electricity, turning a farming village into the Manchester of the North, and now the self-declared sauna capital of the world.
Farmers settled around the rapids from the 7th century, but the place stayed small for a long time. Markets were ordered there in 1638, and the first industries were watermills and sawmills. A pastor, Erik Edner, proposed a town on the riverbanks, and Gustav III of Sweden founded it as a market town in 1775, granting full town rights in 1779. Because farming was banned inside the limits, residents turned to trade and crafts; even in 1809 the town had under a thousand people.
Then the water went to work. The Scottish industrialist James Finlayson opened a textile factory in 1820, and by 1850 it employed about 2,000 people in a town of 4,000. Paper mills, a flax mill, a blast furnace and machine works followed. Between 1870 and 1900 the population roughly quintupled, starting near 7,000 and ending the century near 36,000, a third of them factory workers and more than half women. In 1882 Tampere became the first Nordic city to light its streets electrically for general use. A pulp mill built on the rapids in 1865 by the engineer Fredrik Idestam was the seed of Nokia, which took its name from the neighbouring town where a second mill opened.
The city's workers made it politically charged. In 1905 Lenin's Russian Social Democrats met in the Tampere Workers' Hall, and in 1918 the city was a Red stronghold in the Finnish Civil War until White forces under Mannerheim took it, capturing about 10,000 prisoners.
Today about 263,000 people live in the city, the largest inland city in the Nordic countries, and its industrial past survives in the nickname Manse and in Manserock. Its name is debated: the leading theory traces it to a Proto-Samic phrase for the deep, slow stretch of a stream and its rapids, while one rival suggestion, the Finnish word for oak, runs into the fact that oaks do not grow wild there.
Source: Tampere
