I was recently in a bare-brick-and-zinc-type restaurant in Detroit, enjoying a bowl of duck dumplings in a light broth, when I noticed I was only a couple of hundred yards from the city’s derelict railway station. It was in there, just 20 years earlier, that an angry drug addict had held a semi-automatic shotgun to my head.

The next night I was in a Shoreditchy-type bar, sipping an excellent Chilean rosé, when I realised it was located on Michigan Avenue, and that back in the 1990s you would not even think about going there unless you were in a tank.

Most of us know the story of Detroit. It was the Motor City. Motown. It made a lot of cars that are now made in