Casting around – yet again – for a place where I can retreat from my lovely London life in order to catch up with some writing, I found myself recently in a groovy little flat in central Manchester. I was too broke to go abroad at the time, and the prospect of a week surrounded by babbling brooks and gambolling lambikins brought my urban carcass out in a rash.

But where? I couldn’t face Liverpool, because of that soap opera Brookside. Or Bristol, because it was too close, and I knew the slightest excuse would have me back on the train to London again. Glasgow was too far, too cold and too Scottish. Birmingham was a nonstarter; ditto Cardiff, obviously. And I couldn’t really think of any other cities.

So there I was in Manchester, living the life of a trendy Mancunian, in one of those slotted-together single-unit apartments that always look so alluring in the back of property magazines. It was rather wonderful – for a week. It’s a beautiful city, full of interesting buildings and self-confidence and so on – and property is cheap (compared to London, anyway). Truth be told, by day three I was on the point of suggesting to the Other Half that we should consider moving there.

Then day four dawned, and with it a grim, lonely dinner in a large, virtually empty, very modern hamburger joint where the music was unbearably loud and the waiter kept talking to me as if he and I were personal friends.

It had looked so urban and delightful from the outside, yet everything about the scene inside was wrong. Nobody in the place looked comfortable – it was as if we were all perching on the edge of some irrelevant film set. Suddenly it dawned on me. There, in that hamburger joint, I had my epiphany: the whole hip-and-with-it provincial city thing is not much more than a great big phoney marketing stunt.

There’s nothing more embarrassing than faux grooviness, but it seems to be a speciality of city life beyond the capital. I blame it all on that jolly regeneration cash that used to slosh around Anywhere-but-London. It brought with it cutting-edge architecture that – in my humble opinion – may have encouraged our conservative provincial cousins to put on a cutting-edge strut that, in their hearts, they didn’t entirely believe in or understand.

Along with the strut came the developers, who sniffed a buck amid all that groovy hype. And so, in city centres everywhere, impressive-looking tower blocks with faux-groovy names sprung up like mushrooms, offering the locals the dream of a cutting-edge existence in a “living pod”. The trouble is, of course, it turned out that few of the target buyers could afford them then, and even fewer of them can now. So the tower blocks stand, often half empty, sometimes only half completed, temples of boom-time silly-billyness, pretension and greed.

Which isn’t to say that some of them aren’t still quite attractive, in a silly-billy sort of way. Take the Hub, with its silly-billy name. It’s a 10-storey block, built around a piazza with a water feature, referred to in my glossy brochure as “the still point of a turning world”. Ho hum. When I visited, almost a month ago, the place was still more or less a building site.

Nevertheless, come January, I am assured, all will be completed. At which point, 167 modern and unquestionably attractive living pods (or, rather, the overwhelming proportion of them not to have been sold off-plan) will be released onto the unhungry market. I know they’re attractive because, somewhere in the middle of the hard-hat-and-goggles chaos there was a show floor, finished and furnished, with a prototype for each of the different pods soon to be available. Every one of them is light and sleek and cleverly designed, with tasteful (identical) bathroom fittings, nice-looking wood-laminate floors, decent kitchen fixtures, enormous windows – and cupboards with plumbing for a washing machine.

Prices start at £124,500 for a 491 sq ft second-floor studio, rising to £282,000 for a 1,032 sq ft third-floor, three-bedroom pod with a balcony. Which, given that Manchester Piccadilly train station is a mere five-minute stroll away, strikes me as pretty reasonable.

Perhaps not reasonable enough, though, in the current climate. The Hub’s sales reps said the show flats had been open to the public for “about seven months” when I visited – but only 13 of the 167 pods to be completed by January had been sold. “We’ve had a few drop-outs,”I was told.

The people who showed me round were lovely, bubbling over with enthusiasm for the project and full of hope and optimism – so much so that I felt quite a heel referring to the, er, economic climate. Were they, er, at all worried, I asked them finally, about the, er, collapse in the, er . . .

“Not in the least!” they cried. And it was all so poignant, standing in the middle of that building site with our hard hats and goggles on – and feeling, rightly or wrongly, that we were aboard some vast and sinking ship – I’m afraid I didn’t have the heart to ask the question again. So I let the matter drop. In any case, what with all that nice laminate flooring, they might even buck the trend. I sincerely hope so.

The Hub, Manchester, £282,000

What is it?A three-bed flat with balcony in a new development

Where is it?A few minutes’ walk from Piccadilly station, right in the heart of Manchester

Who is selling it?Savills; 0161 236 0606, www.savills.co.uk

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