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And then of course there is the alternative to the tower; the view from the plane. Sydney is better at 2,000 feet; into my plane window pops the tiniest model of Sydney as neat as a netsuke: the cute little bridge, the Opera House delicate as a snail-shell, the tiny Dufy-esque sailing ships flitting around the bay. Tinier still, so tiny it was shocking, my glimpse (en route from Jakarta to Bangkok) through a gap in the cloud, of a tiny Singapore…its great towers the minutest of crystals seen through a microscope!

Taking off at night and passing low over Buenos Aires I feel almost sick at the beauty of the quadrilateral streets glittering to the horizon; or wafting into London above the vast reticulations of light twinkling in a filigree net of gold glittering in every direction. I know the ugly truths that lie beneath but I love that too, the grey city of the day and the velvet and gold city of night, both huge.

Any Heathrow user knows that by and large the best bet for a landing view of London (though we are too cool to actually admit it) is the right hand window seat, since the most common flightpath is the one that passes over south London; over Camberwell, Clapham etc. going west into Heathrow. But usually it is all over too soon.

In my most recent flight, a routine 50 minutes from Schiphol I had been bumped up to executive. Lucky because this was the one day I needed absolute access to my window, a day when London was glittering with a preternatural clarity, a day when we were held (for air traffic control reasons) twenty minutes in a tight low circle above the capital. Again and again, our plane purred the length of the Thames, almost slowly, as if making love to the city glittering like toytown below.

There is one other 'topographical' act that takes place within the city. It is, I feel, almost something that the city does for itself; for the city can knit itself together, almost with a consciousness of its own; acquiring coherence, to lose
it perhaps, later, then recovering it again, almost independent of human intervention. There is a sense in which cities are building themselves.

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