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[Describing 60s Manchester]...the city's immense and time-blackened nineteenth-century buildings... . Even the grandest of the buildings, such as the Royal Exchange, the Refuge Assurance Company, the Grosvenor Picture Palace, and indeed the Piccadilly Plaza, which had been built only a few years before, seemed so empty and abandoned that one might have supposed oneself surrounded by mysterious façades or theatrical backdrops.