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There is a constant ferment in the fabric of London; it is chronological as well as linear; there is a continual disparity between what buildings were for and what they are for now; it is especially in London that, to understand the city at
all, you have to ask of any building: When was it built? What was it when it was built? What is it now? At a guess I would say that the answers to the last two questions would be different in London more often than in any other city in the world. One structure could, inside 100 years, have been, in turn, theatre, cinema, bingo hall, a wine cash and carry outlet, venue for computer auctions. A Nigerian shop near my flat began as a phone shop (perfunctory booths from which Colombians phoned their families in Barranquilla); video rental was added, then the booths went; then it was video rental and cosmetics; now just cosmetics; three shops up a premises has been within the year an Accommodation Agency, Mobile Phone dealer and Funeral Parlour. Further up the road is a shop that deals with Mobile Phones and Martial Arts Equipment.

For months, in fact years, I criss-crossed the city, seeing my large A-Z map inked in with increasing density, acquiring a linear logic indiscernible as you actually walk it: the density of the streets at the heart of the City, the
looser textures of thoroughfares set free of land-value constraints at the north, the mournful repetitiveness of the transtamesian suburbs, the axis, evident only retrospectively, that runs 12 miles from Tooting Bec in the far south to Stoke Newington in the north; or the more obvious west-east axis: Acton, Shepherds Bush, Marble Arch, Holborn and into the East End. There are cities where the major axes are excitingly suggestive of the grand sweep of a quill across parchment (Sextus Vl in Rome), nib across vellum (Haussman in Paris), Rotring across graph paper (Neimeyer in Brasilia). You can't feel the same in London; the axes, with a few exceptions are (at best) organic, pragmatic; at worst extraordinarily arbitrary and hence vulnerable to (or, if we are lucky, beneficiaries of) Utopian change.

As I walked I had the impression of passing long sequences of building in which each item was disconnected from the next; a continuous feeling of dislocation, presenting me with a constant need to reassess, revise my expectations. London is an epic confusion, epically diverse, multifarious, monumentally unpredictable, comically dissonant in its juxtapositions, breathtakingly profligate of its opportunities, touchingly full of lurches from the sublime to the downright ignominious.

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