Last week, as I walked along the banks of the River Irwell, on a still dank January afternoon, the sound of a digger echoed across the water. I realised that the last industrial chimney in central Salford had just vanished from the skyline, with no fuss at all.

The most impressive thing, of course, said Ferber, were all the chimneys that towered above the plain and the flat maze of housing, as far as the eye could see. Almost every one of those chimneys, he said, has now been demolished or taken out of use. But at that time there were still thousands of them, side by side, belching out smoke by day and night.

I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone…