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I go down to the streets again where I watch demolition with a different eye: the inquisitive proboscis of a demolition drill nudges and nibbles solicitously at an apparently sound seventies office block, bringing it down with the greatest care, almost tenderness. This operation is superintended by two Lego-like little men in pressed uniforms, helmets, white gloves, bearing batons like the lightswords of a Jedi.

Practically speaking and day by day we see change happening all the time; indeed we barely notice it. Back in the seventies Alvin Toffler in Future Shock described how he sent his daughter to a local store. An hour later he finds her back at home watching TV: their conversation goes (as I recall) something like this:

Did you get it?
Er, no Dad. The store wasn't there any more.

In fact she was mistaken; she had been to the wrong corner. The point here is that she just accepted that a busy store can, within weeks, become a wasteground.

We perceive changes in the fabric of the city in different ways. They may not impinge on us instantly. On our way to work we might register, merely register the inconvenience of a hoarding, the noise of demolition; the presence of massive building works hardly impinges on us, so much is it a part of the city; only after a couple of years does the sudden removal of a hoarding shock us into accommodating something new.

There is thus the continual objective change in the urban fabric. But there is other change, the change in outr perceptions. The Centre Pompidou in Paris by Rogers and Piano is now well-established, indeed old enough to need urgent refurbishment. I was dutifully shocked by it in the late 60s, this great bare oil refinery of a building planted athwart the Paris of Bresson, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati. Oh the picturesque old market! How could they?

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