OK. Now, if you are still with me, add to the above projects some recent ones already in place: Michael Wilford’s Lowry Centre, a £100m theatre and art gallery complex just across the canal from the Imperial War Museum: provocative architecture that is somewhat diluted by a big bland new shopping centre and apartment tower built right next to it. Or Bridgwater Hall, the Halle Orchestra’s relatively new home, which is OK if slightly second-division. Or the ever-expanding Museum of Science and Industry in Castlefields. There are other things, such as a big project to improve the run-down Piccadilly Gardens in the centre of the city and huge post-industrial regeneration schemes to the east and south of the centre. There is something happening almost everywhere.

Add in the latest commercial stuff, and I make it about £1.5 billion of public and private investment since the blast of ‘96 - of which about £500m is directly related to the post-bomb redesign. This is happening in a city that, like London and Edinburgh, has a growing residential population to serve. Fine: so how does it feel?

Too much, yet somehow not enough. All these expensive projects don’t have quite the cumulative impact that you might expect: mainly because Manchester is very big and they are scattered around the place. Down in the Salford and Trafford ship canal area, the space to fill is simply immense: even the huge Old Trafford football ground seems diminished by the flat landscape and huge skies. Which is why Wilford’s Lowry, and now Libeskind’s Imperial War Museum, are strident gatekeepers of the canal, using every shot in their architectural lockers to attract attention. Where the Lowry is big, the Imperial War Museum is relatively small. However, it is a small building conceived on an epic scale. The idea is that its three curving sections - representing earth, air and water - are shards of a globe shattered by war.

The tall “air” section marks the entrance and is a typically empty-yet-resonant Libeskind sculptural space, complete with lift to a viewing platform in it. The exhibition gallery with its slightly unsettling black, domed floor takes up the Earth section, while the Water bit by the canal is the restaurant. That’s it - small, as I said. Also cheap. But Libeskind is a master at achieving effects on a limited budget. It is a building of great vigour and high intelligence. It makes demands of you.