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There is a jerky quality to this that is remarkably modern. We can imagine a handheld camera darting up some New York tenement alley.)

But there is more to the experience of walking than mere street detail; there is the kinetic experience: watching the texture and the quality of the building change minute to minute, thickening and thinning as you walk, darting to and fro in history as perhaps nowhere in the world; now twentieth, now, (between an Iceland Supermarket and a double glazing outlet) astonishingly a row of Georgian cottages; now residential, now commercial; but however disparate, item by item the whole knit together and given purpose (at very least the purpose of going in one particular direction!) by a common axis; in London this is an often errant, vacillating axis (the wavering tentacles of the outer suburbs); at other times dramatically purposeful (for all the triviality and bathos of the detail along the way): the Roman roads of Watling Street (from Marble Arch to Cricklewood) or Ermine Street (from London Bridge to Stamford Hill). And there is always a rich interaction between their purposeful straightness on one hand and the abrupt descents that London so repeatedly provides from the sublime to the ridiculous.

To walk the streets of London is to have a poignant awareness of its vulnerable fabric. Vienna and Paris have the solidity of embastioned fortresses compared to London, with its long rows of houses wittering out into the nether reaches of the city. This unassuming linearity of housing development impressed the Danish architect Rasmussen in the 1930s (London Unique City)
but, alas, means housing of a terrible vulnerability; there was little anticipation (when Rasmussen wrote) of how easily a whole row, or almost worse, a bit of a row of housing, could be punched out, by an enemy bomb, by a demolition squad. This vulnerability was made all the more easy by the fact that these houses, however admired and coveted today for being "Georgian", had in many cases been perfunctorily built; shallow foundations, walls that could be resolved with ease into a cloud of plaster dust. The housing stock of London! How poor so much of it is, and yet how pathetically grateful we are for these regal categories: Georgian, Regency, Victorian, Edwardian! How we love those "original features"! (by which we often mean no more than some Edwardian door handle or tap, mass produced, of course; because we are hardly dealing here with fixtures hand-honed in the workshops of the Arts and Crafts Movement.)

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