I SAT with my ward colleague Jon in the Marble Arch on Rochdale Road and listened. The very nice, very thoughtful people around me lived in the tumble of renovation and new build developments that had sprung up around Angel Meadow, a place once both home to some of the monuments of the co-operative movement, and an Irish slum Friedrich Engels termed “Hell on Earth.”

I often wonder whether, when flogging flats in the Far East, the slick, multilingual video realtors mention that the angels of this meadow are the children who died in the sort of squalor we can’t imagine. I also wonder whether they know that there are no red squirrels in the park — the ones on the corporate identity brochures must be day-trippers from Formby.

Still, as the group of young people clustered around my table sat and sipped the very decent beer, the echoes came through.