Crime-ridden, drug-addled and left to rack and ruin, Hulme Crescents in the early 90s was not for the faint of the heart. In fact it was so dodgy even the locals had to take extra precautions.
"I used to put my camera strap over my head and across my body, then put the camera under my coat," photographer Al Baker says. "That way if anybody tried to grab it, they'd take me with them.
"Then I'd have a Kwik Save bag with my lenses and a few reels of film in it so it looked like I'd just come back from the shops. That's how I used to walk round Hulme."
But in amongst all that poverty and squalor, Hulme Crescent was also a place of remarkable energy and creativity. Named after renowned architects from the Regency period, the imposing Brutalist estate on the edge of the city centre was made up of a series of huge, six-storey concrete blocks joined by so-called 'streets in the sky'.
But, from the off, costs were cut and, within a couple of years, the estate was vermin-ridden, mouldy and almost impossible to heat. By the mid-80s Manchester council, which at that point had a surplus of housing, and the rest of the authorities had virtually given up on the Crescents.
And as families moved out of the crumbling desolate blocks, the empty flats they left behind were filled by Manchester's young bohemians - punks, artists, musicians, drop-outs, druggies and anyone else on the fringes of mainstream society.
Hulme was condemned to demolition, but in the meantime it became the centre of the city's thriving DIY counter-culture. And Al, then a young aspiring photographer living in a council flat in Bentley House, known locally as the 'Redbricks', was right in the middle of it.
"When I moved in it was literally the last days," he said. "The council had given up on it.
"I think it became an embarrassment to them. You had all these business people driving up the Parkway from the airport for meetings in town and they'd drive past this concrete monstrosity right on the edge of the city.
"It was a life of extremes. There was extreme poverty, lots of crime, addiction, lots of violence. It was a pretty grim place.
"But the other side of that was there was lots of freedom. There were free parties, (song-writer, artists and poet) Edward Barton literally turned his flat into a walk-in art gallery.
"There were two or three recording studios. The Kitchen became a famous after-hours club where you'd see Mike Pickering, the Happy Mondays and 808 State. You had the Dog Bar which opened at 3-4am where we'd all sit round listening to techno. It was a place where people just did stuff."
But even though Al had a wealth of exhilarating subject matter right on his doorstep, he didn't immediately recognise it.
"Before I moved to Hulme, I'd been living a shared house in Withington with a load of mates, where we'd have these big parties with a bonfire at the end of the garden," he said. "I realised I'd lived through all that wild life and not taken any photos of any of that because I was trying to make 'art'.
"The penny suddenly dropped. I started photographing real-life. And that idea collided with me moving to Hulme."
And as an adopted local Al, who moved to Manchester from his native Grimsby as a 17-year-old in the mid 80s, had an advantage over the film crews and out-of-towners photographers who regularly visited the estate to capture a slice of gritty urban realism.
"I wasn't a stranger," he said. "I was what American war photographers call 'embedded'.
"So when people saw me they weren't looking at the camera, they were looking at me, Al from the pub out with his camera again. And that, for a photographer, is gold dust."
Graffiti artists, squat parties, break-dancers, a bare-chested kid on a vandalised car, a trio of punks sat on a sofa during a picnic and the stark, unforgiving architecture, Al's remarkable photos, which have now been collected together for the first time in a new book entitled The Last Days of Hulme, captured the dying light of a unique time and place in Manchester history.
"It's very difficult to photograph the ordinary, but Hulme was extraordinary. If I had a time machine I'd go back and shoot three times as much. Sometimes after I been developing I'd take my pictures down the pub and show them to people and they'd be like 'Oh it's Dave' or 'It's that building round the corner'.
"Now people go ape shit when they see them because Dave's dead and that building's long gone. Pictures are springboards into stories."
And despite it being 30 years since the Crescents were knocked down, Al, now 55, says he is still inspired by the 'spirit' he saw there.
"What it taught me was 'Don't ask for permission. Just do it'," he said. "If you're complaining people don't put on the bands you like, then do it yourself. If you think the nightclubs are rubbish then start your own.
"I often think about how spoiled my generation was because of places like Hulme where you could do that without interference. Now all the empty buildings and mills have either been knocked down or turned into flats.
"If I was 20-years-old now where would I be going? Where are today's cracks in the pavements where those things can grow?"
Al Baker's Hulme pictures are being exhibited at Kim's Kitchen, on Birley Street in Hulme, until June 14.