From the million-pound apartments of Deansgate to the red-brick terraces of Moston, so many tens of thousands of people here didn't bother to vote at the last election that Lucy Powell, the incumbent Labour MP, was elected in a 2012 byelection with just 12% support in the lowest parliamentary poll turn out since 1945.
The rooms look a bit like stone thatched wigwams, some with private terraces, but it's the drama of the cliff-edge dotted with diving platforms that holds everyone's attention, alternately tempting and terrifying.
As a further insult, London bristles with two-storey Victorian terraces that are a wildly inefficient use of such coveted space.
A simple timber box, it showed how the rambling concrete terraces of the Southbank Centre can be enlivened with nimble intervention – proving they don't really need to be smothered with giant glass containers of shops and restaurants.
If half of the indignation expended on Cantona's insane assault had been invested in combatting the aggressive culture of the terraces then Wednesday's incident might never have happened.
I remember catching the vaporetto down Venice's Grand Canal, gazing up at the obviously more affluent tourists sipping prosecco in glasses (not plastic cups) on palazzo terraces (not windowsills), and I think I actually sighed.
But on the travelling terraces not surrendering to the IRA became entrenched as a key feature of chest-beating nationalism, anti-Irishness a statement of ultra-Englishness.
The Crown pub sits beside the river Gipping on one side of the northern crossing, with the narrow, coloured terraces of Cardinalls Road on the other.
His first major field study was an analysis of the behaviour of football hooligans, at a time when there was serious concern about the levels of violence on the terraces and in the streets.
Stay in the wonderfully peaceful Casa Hassan, (casahassan.com), two townhouses split across a narrow alleyway which are free of telephones, TVs and the internet, but which boast a fabulous hammam, traditional restaurant and roof terraces with spectacular views.
Stones, lighters, coins, flares, chunks of crumbling terrace and other objects – the Albanian FA's submission claims a wheelbarrow was spotted on the terraces – found their way on to the pitch having been hurled in the direction of Albanian players.
