One can read clear echoes of Friedrich Engels's work in the 1920s Chicago School of urban theorists with their concentric zone theory or in any number of modern university courses on cultural criticism and social geography, with their derivative Henri Lefebvre influenced focus on the production or archaeology of space. Engels's initial literary response to the state of Manchester was not the Condition. It was a far more considered work of early Marxist thought which sought to move Feuerbach's materialism further on from the idealistic Young Hegelian remnants which still enveloped it. Proudhon's stress on the correlation of labour with ownership, alongside his conviction that political equality necessitated the abolition of private property, struck an immediate chord with the young Engels. In post-industrial Manchester and post-imperial London, the hypocritical gaze which, for all his simplifications, Engels so brilliantly elucidated, still manages to codify, conceal and even dictate the urban edifice.