It looked like normal concrete. It poured like normal concrete. But it had a super power.

James Baker, chief executive of Graphene@Manchester, couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing as he observed the installation of a new roller disco floor in Manchester’s Depot Mayfield development.

The concrete slab was setting so fast, and so strong, that the builders had begun gliding polishing machines over the driest part of the floor while their colleagues were still pouring the other end of the rink.

“Normally, you’d have to wait a week before you could do that,” he says. The installation, in October last year, took less than a day.

This concrete was special because it contained a tiny but transformative amount of graphene, microscopic flakes of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice.