Manchester, drawn from its own streets.

Manchester on paper

Seven kilometres across puts the whole centre on the sheet with Salford attached to it, and the two are separated by the Irwell — a hard wandering line that no planner would have drawn, which is exactly why it reads so well against everything around it. The canals do the opposite. The Rochdale and the Ashton meet the Bridgewater in the south of the centre, and on paper they are unmistakable: deliberate, angular, cutting across the street pattern with locks at the corners. Follow them and you have found the warehouse districts without needing a single label.

The street grid is the other thing the print shows honestly. Manchester's core is close to rectilinear — blocks laid out for goods, not for views — so it prints as a dense weave of short streets, and the railway viaducts slice through it on their own diagonals. Around that weave the radial roads run out like spokes: Oxford Road and Wilmslow Road heading south through the universities, Chester Road to the south-west, Rochdale Road north-east. The Mancunian Way crosses the bottom of the centre as one long unbroken curve, the only line on the sheet that ignores everything it passes over.

Come in tighter and the character changes street by street. A two-kilometre frame on Ancoats is all mills and yards; the same width over Chorlton or Didsbury is long avenues of red-brick semis with back entries between them. Go wider instead, to fifteen or twenty kilometres, and the print takes in the whole conurbation — Stockport, Salford, Trafford — where the motorway ring and the rivers are what you see, and the individual streets become the texture holding it together.