This year, I frequently boarded the train from Euston to Manchester. An experience that feels like it’s been constructed as an experiment to see how much a person can deal with before their soul is completely broken down by high prices, constant strikes and delays, and overcrowding. But a city with heart awaits.

The first time I did the journey was in February. The same day Bob Marley would have also been presented with a cake; we watched my grandad blow out the candles for his 94th birthday for what was to be the final time. He became very ill afterwards and in the months that followed, I saw more family than I had since I was a child when we all gathered in the house every Sunday and on Christmases before everyone became very busy with jobs, friends, their own children. The time pressures of adulthood.

Together we frequented Grandad’s most treasured spaces. My aunts and uncles would tidy the house. My cousin maintained his Chorlton allotment. Chips and gravy were bought from his favourite red brick chippy in Old Trafford for his tired carers – they’d always remark that I probably couldn’t get such a delicacy in London. Visitors from their church on the border of Hulme would pass by to give him words of comfort. They were a close-knit community who had bought the church together through a paadna scheme (an informal Caribbean saving system based on trust and patience), maintained it, raised their children there, and created a network for new Caribbean families in the area. Even though my grandfather, a keen farmer hailing from the Clarendon countryside, was not originally from here, he'd put down such deep roots that still bear fruit for us all, evident in our ties to community and the spaces that also anchored us in our early years. His funeral this summer was a window into his Manchester, that got me thinking about my own.

My love for the city is a tale of all the different locations where I picked up a hodgepodge of influences. As a Jamaican-Nigerian, my relatives houses’ in between Old Trafford and Longsight were filled with a heady mix of the sound of Caribbean elders speaking in tongues, feasts full of flavour, loud laughter, Yoruba on the phone to distant friends, with Coronation Street playing in the background.

My older sister would dance at the Zion centre, a Black arts venue which was an outlet for both her hyperactivity and her creativity. When she got home, we’d watch the music channels which broadcast local girl group “Cleopatra comin’ at ya” to our television. I thought they were so cool, especially when they got a bit older and one of them had enrolled their child into my Whalley Range primary school. One of my earliest celebrity sightings.

Inspired, we’d make our own songs or film home movies with cousins as supporting acts believing that one day, we too could be stars. One such cinematic masterpiece was stylised like a John Singleton classic which usually took place in American hoods, but we named it after a nearby infamous area that had been the centre of gang violence in the ‘90s and ‘00s. It was also the neighbourhood where we’d attend Manchester carnival and buy food from the high concentration of Black takeaway restaurants.

On the way home, to unwind from our hectic production schedule, I’d make my mum stop at a newsagent to buy Simpson’s Comics, Horrible Histories, and Top of the Pops magazine before graduating to Company and Cosmopolitan and retire to my room to read. I preferred escaping into written worlds where my imagination could run free without outside interference.

I lived in Sale, the posher side of town, and went to school in Altrincham, a much whiter, more conservative enclave of the city. In contrast to my mostly Black and Asian primary school, which was closer to the city’s centre, my adolescence was in a monocultural environment I didn’t fit into. For the first time, I was forced to confront and understand what race and identity represented as a concept to me and those around me, because for many children in that school I was definitely the first Black person they’d ever really spoken to. Still, feeling like you don’t fit in is a universal teenage experience and my friends and I travelled the beaten path of other teens in the city: Trafford Centre, Pictures, and food court on the weekend; Afflecks palace and Market Street on days where it wasn’t raining, loitering at tram stations while shrieking at each other’s jokes.

I grew up during the ill-fated era of the “chav”, a much-derided term that Owen Jones eventually argued was created to demonise the white working classes, that was also strangely simultaneously worn as a badge of honour by kids who viewed it as a subculture to tap into that differentiated them from emos and goths. High street large hoop earrings, leggings with Uggs, maybe a quilted charm bag for the high-end loiterer. When we did venture out out, we first landed upon Deansgate Locks: a bodycon and skyscraper heel convention. That got boring, quickly. I much preferred Factory; a dark and extremely sweaty club that had several floors, but we preferred the R&B and hip-hop room at the top.

The arts organisation is the mastermind behind Manchester International Festival and also the new 150,000 square foot blockbuster art space that embellishes the bank along the River Irwell in the nucleus of the city centre. It can welcome 5,000 standing art lovers, and 1,500 seated as they’re invited to tap into the creative potential of the city.

With a program of free events, it gives teens somewhere to hang around in town, where they can discover culture for themselves, for free. An investment in our stories, our artists, our unique tone of voice, sense of humour, sense of difference. It will hopefully birth a new generation of legends.

Mostly it will become another space key to someone else’s core memories; of their first gigs, the first time they see art that really speaks to them or perhaps the first venue to take a chance on them and build their confidence as a creative. It will become another hub for the artistic community and encourage others to journey to experience Manchester’s vivid imagination.