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Not a breathtaking view; just an ineluctable scroll of information; the horizon for eight miles, west to east, studded with major buildings.

For nearly twenty years I have had a working relationship with this view. I don't crane at all hours from my window. The thing is that it be there. I can draw the curtains on this view, ignore it for a week, treat it cavalierly, merely glancing above it for weather information, privately thrilling, the while, to the fact that it is all there. Alternatively I dwell on it through binoculars, scanning it at dawn at dusk, at all hours, watching the slow rise of new buildings, the demolition of others, the City University ablaze, the refurbishment over years of the dome of St Paul's, the sad, slow attrition of Battersea Power Station (happily now arrested), registering the rainbows, dirigibles, balloons, helicopters that flash above it; champagne glass in hand watching the pyrotechnics sweep east up the Thames at the Millennium, the backup of planes nudging one by one into the flightpath through to Heathrow, seeing London some days abject under the rain, serried, squat; on others epic beneath great banks of undisciplined cloud, churning up the Thames, the scattered beams of frustrated sunshine momentarily striking the flanks of City offices, the rise of Foster's shimmering Swiss Re tower ; at the close of long summer days fiery and splendid, ennobled with the rays of the setting sun, redolent of the enormity of its history, its jarring planes and patchy dissonances uniting to give an illusion, almost, of intention and harmony, knit together in a pinky grey dusk, like Petra: "a rose red city - half as old as time."

Down in the street and things are more prosaic. The grime starts at the window panes. Through it I look into Acre Lane, Brixton; a decent, even refined thoroughfare in the photographs of a century ago: tree-lined, white villas behind railings, a carriage in the street and (as always in Victorian photo-topography) the little ghost of the child who moved when the man with the box took the picture.

This was Brixton as "the Belgravia of south London" it was said then, (probably by an estate agent), a Pooterish respectability; nothing grander. Next to my flat is the site of the Hope Tea Rooms, I find on a map of 1850; surely a temperance institution which has since become my local, the Hope and Anchor.

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