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Tampere sits on a narrow isthmus between two lakes with an eighteen-metre height difference, and that gap is what built the city. The Tammerkoski rapids powered the mills and factories that made Tampere the 'Manchester of the North' through the nineteenth century. James Finlayson arrived from Scotland in 1820 and built a textile factory on the river that eventually employed two thousand workers. In 1865, Fredrik Idestam opened a pulp mill on the same rapids and named his company after a Finnish river: Nokia. The mills and the phone company both started at the same water.

In 1905, Vladimir Lenin held a conference here of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and met Stalin for the first time.

The decisions made in Tampere contributed to the October Revolution of 1917. The city was a Red stronghold during the 1918 Finnish Civil War and was taken by White forces in April of that year. This history is not papered over: the Workers' Museum at the old Finlayson factory addresses it directly. The red brick factory buildings themselves, enormous Victorian hulks along the river, now contain cinemas, restaurants, and a brewery.