I first started coming to Manchester, trundling over on the train from north Wales, as a teenager in the mid 1990s.

Back then the city was still – like the lad culture of the time – markedly unreconstructed.

Piccadilly station was a dark network of unwelcoming, shadowy nooks and crannies.

"Piccadilly Gardens, a plaza that should be Manchester’s pride and joy, is – despite a huge public campaign by the M.E.N. and promises that it would be fixed – once again a dispiriting mess."

The titanic rebuild around the Shambles, post-bomb, had not yet been dreamt up. Spinningfields was not a thing and neither was the Beetham Tower.

The old, sunken Piccadilly Gardens still squatted at the city’s heart, packed to the gills with drugs. Piccadilly Approach teemed with beggars.

I didn’t mind, of course. I was 15. It was Manchester’s chaotic, charismatic cultural scene that drew me to the city, one that – no matter how hard planners may try to replicate it now – was in part, paradoxically, borne of that very inner-city dereliction.

Fast forward 20 years and it sometimes feels like the pendulum has swung the other way.

(Image: Mark Waugh)

Today Manchester is basking in a new kind of adulation: one of economic success, of boom times, of new restaurants – 60 this year – and ministerial reverence. Piccadilly station has been rebuilt; it is expected to be rebuilt again ahead of HS2.

A second Spinningfields, and with it a tower bigger than the Beetham, is now planned.

Yet if you look closely, it could still be 1995.

Piccadilly Approach provides a grim entrance to Manchester, just as it did back then. On Saturday night my friends and I, all either from Manchester or long-time residents, were all separately stunned by how intimidating, how filthy, and how full of sad, destitute people it was once again.

Rough sleepers, once rehoused by the council and monitored in a co-ordinated way by the police, lie comatose, clutching empty bottles in the middle of the street.

Piccadilly Gardens, a plaza that should be Manchester’s pride and joy, is – despite a huge public campaign by the M.E.N. and promises that it would be fixed – once again a dispiriting mess.

This is the Manchester visitors see when they arrive. It is also the Manchester most Mancs see, much of the time – not the suites of 50-storey hotels or £1,000-a-month apartments. It would be trite to say it is a tale of two cities, so I won’t.

But it is all too easy for politicians to celebrate the skyscrapers when street level is unpalatable.

Despite the boom, plenty of people are still bust.

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See some stunning shots of Manchester from above...