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I realised that I could, and in no whimsical way, walk into pictures of cities; but, more important, walk out of them too, and not the way I came.

I learned to look at views and know, just know where I was heading. I have always had a good sense of direction and I have found that it operates just as well on paper. I knew what I would see if I walked into and through a print and turned first left (a turning magically evoked by the slightest hatching of the engraver's burin) I just know intuitively as well as factually that, if in 1770, I take the second right after Northumberland House on the Strand I will catch the scent of sawdust from the timber yard on the shore, see the York Buildings Waterworks Company Tower at the edge of the river, a hundred yards to my left, and fastforwarding mentally 100 years, there would be instead the smell of fish and meat from the innovative Tesco-like Hungerford market; and ten years later again the smell of demolished masonry as that market came down to make way for Charing Cross station.

The logical outcome of all this two dimensional knowledge together with my actual "orientation" skills developed into an remarkably intense "mental ambulation". I could, with eyes closed, "walk" (virtually speaking) in detail from Westminster to Charing Cross in the past from Charing Cross to the foot of St. Paul's, some two miles.

True some periods are topographically more patchily recorded than others; and there are some tracts that may never have been recorded. But it is possible to cover much of this route (really the two greatest axes of London until the nineteenth century) with a great deal of accuracy, at intervals say of 1600, 1700, 1800. By the time we reach 1900 photography makes the exercise all the easier; indeed the game is up, not because the challenge to the imagination has gone; rather because there is too much information for the imagination to satisfactorily marshal and sequence. For to walk streets in this way does not consist of heavy fingeredly tracing your way along a thoroughfare, picturebook in the other hand. To actually walk through London in the seventeenth century, while depending on a mass of literal material, must be the eyes closed act in which the imagination knits together the topographical detail into an intense but not consistently detailed experience, (as it would be in real life after all; for we do not relate to what we pass through with a consistent focus; sometimes we just pitch up somewhere after half an hour on automatic pilot.).

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