Cigarettes, perfume and alcohol.
Some of the smells of an urban summer.

The rail that the women are walking by now leads to an underground office car park. It used to be the site of a notorious Manchester nightclub, The Millionaire Club.

I say notorious because when I started working there in 1992 it had just seen gangland fights between the Cheetham Hill gang and some lads from one of the Salford gangs. The plate glass doors had been smashed through.
My younger brother Dan also worked there for a while.

Trouble was never far away from the club; it eventually closed down due to a shooting (thankfully no-one was injured.)
I'd been due to work the night of the shooting, decided to chuck a "sicky" and go out with my girlfriend instead. I turned up the next night to find a sign saying "closed until further notice." It never reopened.
The gangland trouble had continued for some months. It culminated in someone shooting the ceiling with a machine pistol.

For those interested in bits of social history, the book "Gang War: The Inside Story of the Manchester Gangs" by Peter Walsh is an excellent read about the intermittent violence that plagued the city for a number of years.