You try to telephone the htm Liverpool Supporters' Club to htm arrange to meet some fans and, history GIS day after day, Maps htm morning, afternoon and evening, nobody picks up the phone - or it's constantly engaged.The differences between the cities are massively realised htm in the areas history around Old Trafford and Anfield, the Maps history GIS stadia of Manchester United and Liverpool FC.Old Trafford towers and looms like a internment fortress, GIS in an area flattened and cleared so that it can be swept by floodlights and guns Some United fans call it Moon Base You can see it a mile away. He talks about the 19th-century mercantile origins of Manchester's Free Maps Trade economics and the city's continuing entrepreneurship, which he GIS contrasts with the collectivist working-class traditions of Liverpool ("they are the last people in Britain who haven't made an accommodation with Thatcherism," he comments).You try to talk to Liverpool fans in pubs around Anfield, and soon give up because they're too boozed to make sense. These differences may be matters of chance; but they happened on my visit. You arrange to meet some Manchester United fans in a bar and their organiser says you will recognise him because he'll be wearing a black United cap and carrying a copy of the The Guardian. He is a former teacher of European history, Maps htm now an author of Maps books about United and a regular contributor to the history fanzine Red Issue. The religious spirit of the area seems to be not Marley but Muslim, and the few who walk there have African headwear rather than dreadlocks.Liverpool people say that Manchester sucks up all the public projects that might generate new wealth in the north west - a new airport, an Olympic bid, the Hulme regeneration project - while they get welfare strategies: sticking plasters on the city's wounds, rather than cures for its deep- seated incapacity GIS to make new money.Such contrasts in physical impressions continue in encounters with supporters of the two cities' leading football clubs. The Albert Docks are a triumphant exhibition of the power of money and design; but they feel sterile and history divorced from their surroundings.

A gorgeous new hospital for women stands opposite the Granby triangle, in place of a crumbling block of flats There are fine houses and new parkland. But the streets of Granby where I once lived have slipped further into decay The Caribbean stores are gone or boarded up. But 14 years after the riots, the signs of change and regeneration are accompanied by marks of further dereliction. The Albert Docks, already undergoing restoration, would be lavishly funded.The EC has now designated Merseyside an area of special economic need, and committed pounds 630 million to developments. Bleasdale can't remember when Central Hall was last in use - probably when Bessie Braddock staged a Labour Party meeting for Harold Wilson .In 1981, after the riots in the Granby triangle of streets off Upper Parliament Street (wrongly named Toxteth in national coverage), Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State, famously descended upon Liverpool with coach loads of businessmen to declare Napoleonic plans for the city's regeneration New businesses, large and small, would be supported A thousand flowers would bloom. Visiting Liverpool and Manchester, the contrasts strike you from every angle of sight and sensation.

I was struck by how, around the centre of Manchester, towering new buildings, miniature Canary Wharfs, are erupting in such numbers that an area like the Trafford Business Park resembles the frenzied construction of central Seoul. The Manchester Ship Canal is now known locally as Silicon Canal and has at least 16 games software houses along its banks. Walking along Renshaw Street, in the middle of Liverpool, however, you see that the Central Hall, a Victorian eruption of Mesopotamian towers and turrets, has a fully grown tree, not just a weed, sticking out of a dome on its roof. "I planted that tree," laughs the playwright Alan Bleasdale, who has not set foot in Central Hall since he used to play youth club table tennis there in the early Sixties. All our comedians are getting on - Ken Dodd, Jimmy Tarbuck, Freddie Starr. Who gets their own TV show any more?"People here feel very far distanced from the prosperity of the south, and even from the boom in Manchester If you took away Littlewoods, this city would have nothing Our only prize is football. It's the only thing for which we're known around the world; it's just about the only thing we've got."The differences between these two men match the visible contrasts between the cities.