Downtown Manhattan (the financial district and Tribeca) is a lot livelier than it was two years ago, and so much more alive than London’s City that the comparison is almost cruel. Where the City is focuses on offices and office workers’ needs (pubs, sandwich shops, some shops), downtown Manhattan is a mixed neighbourhood with both offices and residential buildings. People actually live here. When I walk to work in the morning, there are joggers and dogwalkers – not just the ubiquitous delivery vans. And the resident population has attracted restaurants and shops that are open in the evenings and weekends. In fact I saw to my surprise that many shops here are open from the morning rush hour till late evening, 8 to 8, so even those who work long hours can do their shopping before or after work. The streets are still awake when I walk home around 7pm. In London, everything is closed by that time, and during weekends the City is like a ghost town.

The other thing that struck me is how spacious Manhattan is. Streets are wide. Pavements are really wide – wide enough for food carts and their queues, without blocking the street. There are even empty spaces between buildings. Shops in Soho are roomy and even cheaper shops feel like spacious showrooms. There are advantages to building upwards instead of sideways!

But Manhattan is just like London in that streets are in miserable shape in both places. In London streets get dug up and then half-heartedly patched over, until you can barely see the original surface and there are more bumps and patches than there is even surface. Manhattan streets just seem to degrade. Potholes, crumbling edges, sunken and slanting concrete slabs to stumble on. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I cannot remember any of Stockholm’s streets looking this sad.