At first glance, this looks like exactly the sort of pub you’d expect to find opposite the Palace Theatre: a handsome old Victorian-looking Manchester pub, photographed here in the 1970s, serving theatre-goers and city-centre drinkers.

This isn’t a particularly old map - it was published in 2002 - but wow, what a change.

It’s a small part of Andrew Taylor’s Manchester City Centre Map, a brilliantly detailed series that began in the 1990s.

Rewind around 120 years, and my walking tour group would have been standing outside the old Pine Apple Inn on Water Street.

Today, they’re underneath the huge Aviva Studios, home of Factory International.

I absolutely love looking at old maps. There’s something fascinating about comparing the Manchester we know today with the one that used to be there.

The Goad maps are especially brilliant.

I think very few people realise that some of Manchester city centre’s green spaces are actually old burial grounds.

Take All Saints Park, in the middle of the MMU campus. Beneath the grass are the remains of more than 16,000 people.

This is a then-and-now that doesn’t quite line up. And that’s the point.

The ghosted building is the old Coal Exchange, once standing beside Sinclair’s Oyster Bar on Victoria Street. But Victoria Street has gone, the Coal Exchange has gone, and Sinclair’s itself has been moved.

It’s easy to walk past Mr Thomas’s Chop House and see exactly what the name asks you to see: Mr Thomas. A historic Victorian chop house.

But one of the most interesting stories here belongs to Sarah Studd.

Most people walking along Oxford Road today probably read this as simply “Manchester”.

But this was once Chorlton-on-Medlock - a separate township with its own civic centre, its own Town Hall, police station, churches, schools and institutions.

Maps from different periods don’t always line up neatly, and over distance even a small inaccuracy can become quite noticeable. But they’re still a brilliant way of seeing how the city has evolved.

One discrepancy, though, really bothered me.

Today this is the Stables Tavern in Castlefield - its name a nod to the building’s earlier life as stables serving the nearby railway and warehouse district.

But this is one of those Manchester buildings that has lived several lives.