The city of the future is to be found not just in the post-modern metropole but also in the once great industrial cities from the rust belt of the United States to the centres of the English industrial revolution. A Tale of Two Cities is a study of two such cities in the North of England, Manchester and Sheffield and of the texture of every-day life within them. It explores the hopes and fears, the memories and folk-beliefs, and the present pre-occupations of young professionals, the unemployed, children and young people, the elderly and ethnic minorities and gay people in these two cities. It offers a detailed sociolgical analysis of two defining activities of life - shopping and daily travel and transport. Throughout the book draws on an international range of theory from Raymond Williams to John Logan and Harvey Molotch in order to understand the trajectories of local development in these two superficially similar but actually very different places.