The Manchester of Pakistan — textile mills, canal-grid streets, and Punjabi food culture
Faisalabad is Pakistan's third-largest city and its industrial heart — a city built from scratch in the late 19th century as Lyallpur, planned on a Union Jack street grid with eight bazaars radiating from the central clock tower like spokes, and named after the adjacent canal system that made the surrounding Punjab cotton fields possible. Today it is the textile capital of Pakistan, producing over 40% of the country's cotton and cloth exports, and one of South Asia's great manufacturing cities. Visitors come not for landmarks (there are few) but for the experience of a Pakistani commercial ci…
Faisalabad was founded in 1890 by British engineer James Lyall as Lyallpur — one of the most deliberately planned colonial cities in British India, designed with a central clock tower (modelled on the clock tower in Lahore) and eight bazaar streets radiating outward in the pattern of the Union Jack flag. The city was conceived specifically to service the newly irrigated Lower Bari Doab Canal agricultural zone, which transformed semi-desert Punjab into cotton farmland. The cotton was processed in the city's textile mills, making Lyallpur/Faisalabad the industrial centre of Pakistani Punjab. Th…