Take a Picture of Your Shoes and Win a Trip to Tokyo

The Japanese sports lifestyle brand Onitsuka Tiger’s S/S 2014 campaign – "My Town My Tracks" – is about people exploring their urban environments and highlighting the stuff there that inspires them. The brand is running a competition alongside this, asking entrants to upload an original photograph of the Shaw Runner shoe in their favourite neighbourhood, using the hashtag #shawrunner (a bit like the one below). Do so, and you're entering the "Snap Your Tracks" competition for a chance to win a trip to Tokyo for you and three friends. 

Now, to stir up some hometown pride, here's a profile of everything great about Manchester by writer Caroline Christie.

It might rain for 53 percent of the year in Manchester, but a bit of drizzle isn't a biggie when you've got everything the city has to offer to keep you distracted.

A good first taste of Manchester's cultural scene is Affleck's Palace, in that it's basically a rite of passage for any teenager who, at some point in their adolescence, has been enticed by the heady glamour of cyber-techno, nu-metal and facial piercings. As it turns out, that's the majority of Manchester's teenagers; speak to anyone under 30 in the city or its surrounding suburbs and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn't wandered around the Palace while nervously contemplating a tongue bar.

If inserting pieces of metal through your facial extremities isn't really your bag, then perhaps the city's architecture will be more your kind of pace. Much like any other British city that suffered bombing campaigns during WWII, Manchester is a blend of new builds and relics of the industrial age. On a rare sunny day, the best way to experience that is by heading to Castlefield to hang out by the canal.

A good thing to do when you arrive is discuss any one of the urban legends about the city's canals. For example, the rumour that a local gang member found out his girlfriend had been cheating on him, tracked down the guy she'd been sleeping with and made him walk into the canal. Weirdly, nobody seems to know the specifics, but apparently he got out infected with every disease you can pick up from British canal water (which is presumably quite a few).

Sitting down for extended periods of time is thirsty work, so you'll probably want a drink after you're done with the canal. Start at Sankeys, a venue located inside an old soap factory that's had more opening and closing parties than Mark E Smith's had warm pints. At the end of 2013, it looked like Sankeys could be done for good, but in January it returned from the abyss once again. (If you do go, a quick word of advice: bouncers in there lose their shit over chewing gum; I've seen doormen flip out more over a packet of Airwaves than a toilet cubicle rammed full of bedroom house producers.)

Following Sankeys, there's Antwerp Mansion, a gothic Victorian house that plays host to most of the city's best new club nights. And as you'll inevitably end up there, I'll also include mega-club 5th Avenue in this list – the perfect place to drink 60p "skittle-bombs" at 3AM while a confused DJ crossfades between Justin Timberlake and Rage Against the Machine.

Highlights from the new Onitsuka Tiger collection

If you want live music, Night and Day in the Northern Quarter is where you should kick the night off. Locals love it so much that, when a new resident started complaining to the council about the venue’s excessive late-night noise, 70,000 of the city’s music fans signed a campaign to keep the venue open.

"It’s the only place where they’ve made something good out of the factories," says local resident Poppy Walker.

Of course, there's a lot more to Manchester that staying up until 6AM, especially as every corner has its own particular niche. Sean Rigby, an actor from the city, describes it as being "so compact – you can walk from China Town to the LGBT area of Canal Street and always come across something new".

While London and its pirate stations birthed jungle, garage and grime, Manchester is undoubtedly the spiritual home of acid house. And one of the Second Summer of Love's lasting legacies – aside from memories of rival football hooligans dancing together without the night ending in an assortment of GBH charges – are the abundance of record shops around the city. Vinyl Exchange and Piccadilly Records are a stone’s throw away from each other, and started by a former member of 808 State, any dance music you can't find elsewhere you're bound to track down in the Northern Quarter's Eastern Bloc Records.

Manchester takes its culture seriously, its biennial international festival being a pretty perfect example of that. As ex-resident Barney Davis days, "There aren't many other line-ups where you'd find Adam Curtis, The XX, Mogwai and economist Evan Davis on the same bill."

The Snap Your Tracks contest is open from the 17th of February, 2014 to the 17th of March, 2014. To enter, use the contest app on the Onitsuka Tiger Facebook page, the Statigram website or simply upload your original photograph of the Shaw Runner shoe in your favourite neighbourhood to Instagram, using the hashtag #shawrunner.

To shop the new collection so you can get your hands on the Shaw Runner shoe, visit onitsukatiger.com.