Spirit of Place: A Happy Memory

I came across the picture which illustrates this post on somebody's Twitter and it brought back a flood of happy memories. When I was a young puppy (not in a fetish way, I hasten to add) there were many empty sites around the city centre. I think this one has been cleared preparatory to building Brindley Place but a lot of them dated back as far as the second world war and were of course the result of bombing. This meant that when the Inner Ring Road was intact you had the very small city centre proper, and a circle of post-industrial or just plain empty land before the inner city started. Of course this circle was incomplete or patchy but it was very strange to have just nothing near the centre of the city.