When Bill Bryson came to Manchester on the trip that led to Notes From A Small Island, he wandered around Albert Square, peered at figures on plinths and wondered who those men in frock coats and with mutton-chop whiskers were.

Now, with the help of a hefty guidebook to be launched this week, Bryson will be able to work out who is who.

The book, Public Sculpture Of Greater Manchester, is almost as heavy as some of the pieces it describes. It is a comprehensive, 513-page guide to the statues, busts, obelisks, fountains, war memorials and occasional towers of the city and its region.

It is the latest in a series of guides to public sculpture in Britain prepared as part of the national recording project of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association.

"Statues were part of the aesthetic of the industrial town, a response to the ugliness of the Coketowns of the industrial revolution," says the introduction. "The creation of public spaces, in which the portrait statue was a defining element, was an important part of the making of the Victorian city: a counter to those who believed that the beautiful and the ornamental could not take root in utilitarian soil."

In Albert Square, Bryson should have worked out that the man wearing robes of the Order of the Garter and standing under an elaborate neo-Gothic canopy was Prince Albert. But we can forgive him if he failed to notice that the Roman on a plinth over the main entrance to the town hall is Agricola, the governor of Roman Britain who may have passed this way a couple of millennia ago.

And perhaps it was understandable that he failed to recognise the Manchester political heroes preserved hanging around near Albert: John Bright, opponent of the Corn Laws; Oliver Heywood, supporter of wider educational opportunities for all; and James Fraser, a Manchester bishop who gave up his suburban residence and moved into the city to be nearer his people.

Albert, Bright, Heywood (and nearby Gladstone) all face the town hall. But Fraser gazes towards Princess Street, perhaps towards the cathedral.

The guide is bang up to date, with a reference to Thomas Hetherwick's B Of The Bang, a steel starburst being erected at the City of Manchester Stadium; when complete, it will, at 56m (184ft), be the tallest public sculpture in Britain.

Among other modern works is the £200,000 marble pebble (properly known as Ishinki -Touchstone) by Kan Yasuda outside the Bridgewater Hall. The guide also includes works in the Greater Manchester section of the 30 mile Irwell sculpture trail, with a picture of Edward Allington's Tilted Vase, better known as the Ramsbottom urn.

Among literary heroes, Ammon Wrigley, poet and historian, stands proud in his flat cap in Uppermill in the Pennine foothills. But poor Ben Brierley, writer of dialect poetry and prose, lies crumbling on his side in Heaton Park, dreaming perhaps of resurrection.

Public Sculpture Of Greater Manchester by Terry Wyke with Harry Cocks, Liverpool University Press.