You can smell Little Hulton first.

Little Hulton's been part of Salford since 1974, and most of Salford still couldn't point to it. The smell off the waste site finds you, mind. Peel Park's decent. Walk out of it and somebody's dumped a mattress, and somebody else has kicked the bus shelter in.

Then there are the fires. Somebody sets one here more than eight times as often as in the typical town, and the bins go up nearly twenty times as often. As if the place needed help smelling of burning rubbish. There's rain on 169 days a year, which doesn't seem to slow anyone down.

The editor, who smelt it before he saw it