There is one thing wrong with the new Foyles

I was expecting to love the huge, shiny new Foyles in the former Central St Martins building on Charing Cross Road, but it's even better than I expected. The space and light and organisation don't blot out the eccentricity and curiosity; they accentuate it. No building containing this many freestanding shelves will ever be free of odd corners, however open its floorplan, and the imaginative ways the extra display space is used give a vivid sense of the fine individual tastes stocking the shop. There's more of everything, as far as I can tell. The magazine selection, already quite good, is now very good: I saw my first print copy of The Baffler there yesterday, and bought it. But the way the magazines are stocked is wildly frustrating.

Consider three magazines at the intersection of politics and culture: The Baffler, Adbusters, Dissent. They are none of them easily obtainable in Britain, and Foyles has the lot. Great! Now try to find them. Adbusters is easy: it's in the magazine display at the front, which looks extensive enough to be the whole thing, until you notice a little sign explaining that this is only the art and design magazines: a discreet colour-coded map lists selections of magazines on five different floors. And in fact that underestimates the complexity: most floors have several caches of magazines scattered around their different sections, and there are no signs within sections to tell you where the magazines might be hiding.

Dissent is, logically enough, among the politics magazines, which as promised are on the second floor - on a back wall underneath a secondhand book selection, just to the left of magazines about jazz and world music. (Magazines about rock, pop, film and theatre are on the far side of the same floor.) The Baffler, meanwhile, because of its bookish format, has been classified as a literary magazine: that puts it on the floor below. I look forward to browsing magazines at the new Foyles. I foresee a lot of exercise.

The scattered arrangement also seems to discourage stocking of weeklies: there were some in business, but literature didn't have the New Yorker (or the Atlantic or Harpers - perhaps they're all on another floor) and politics seemed very heavy on quarterlies and quite light on anything else. Stocking magazines is more of a North American bookshop habit than a British one; it's to be encouraged, especially now that so many newsagents are concentrating on the chocolate-and-booze business; but all the American bookstores I've been in kept the magazines together in one place, and there are good reasons for that.

The rat-eating railway of Forest Hill

Pneumatic trains were to the Victorians something like maglev trains are to us: a transport technology of the future that seemed destined to remain there. They even merited some light sarcasm from George Eliot, in the introduction to Felix Holt: The Radical:

"Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow old-fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory."

What I hadn't realised until the other day was that there was an actual pneumatic railway in London in the 1840s - and that I used to live on the route of it. According to The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, the London and Croydon Railway ran air-powered trains between West Croydon and Forest Hill from October 1845.

The service was smooth, and silent, and apparently capable of exceeding 60mph. It had three ornate architect-designed pumping stations: "the most beautiful things of their kind that have ever been erected in this country". It was also ahead of its time in the literal sense that, when it was built, the materials did not exist to make it work properly.

The trains drew their air power from a pipe between the tracks, connecting to it through a "longitudinal valve", which a few decades later would have been made from toughened rubber. In 1845, it was a leather flap lubricated and sealed with a mixture of wax and tallow.

This was all right except in summer, when the tallow melted and the leather became too floppy; in winter, when the tallow froze and the leather became too stiff; and in spring and autumn, when rain washed the tallow off altogether. Oh, and the tallow mixture was also delicious to rats, which would "invade the track nightly":

"When the pumps started up in the morning, rats would be sucked through the pipe into the pumping station. To combat this, the engine room men placed open sacks over the inlet, to catch the rats as they poured in."

Less than a year after the experiment began, the London and Croydon merged into another railway, and the new company turned off the pumps for good.

Spoilsports.

[The Phoenix Suburb: A South London Social History, by Alan R. Warwick, Blue Boar Press, 1976. Haven't finished it yet, but so far it is proper old-school local history, full of street names and semi-disclaimed sensational anecdotes. It's also magnificently provincial. "Whether a suburb is S.E. or S.W., or N. or E., or whatever," says the preface, "it represents a way of life." In this sentence, as best I can tell, "whatever" covers the entire world beyond the inner London postcode system.]

Bicycles, snow

This isn't the kind of place where people buy - or, so far as I've seen, sell - studded bicycle tyres. The few days a year of proper winter weather mean moving from seeking quiet roads to seeking busy ones, where there are gritters and hot-bellied cars and the ice doesn't set in so much. It also means avoiding hills, so that if the ice has set in I can be relatively under control when things go wrong. Peckham is better for this than Sydenham, which was the far side of a very big hill. The problem is that any weather bad enough to make cycling on main roads really unwise will probably also stop the trains and buses, and my boots aren't great. Tomorrow will be the test. Wish me luck.

"Stuff endures"

One of the books that has most stuck in my head in the past year is Ruth Belville: the Greenwich Time Lady, by David Rooney. It's a biography, charming but stretched at less than 200 pages, of a woman famous for one thing. And it's a useful parable for anyone who finds themself in a rapidly, scarily changing industry (hi, fellow journalists!).

Ruth Belville inherited from her mother the business of going once a week to the observatory at Greenwich, having a fine 18th-century pocket watch set to the precise astronomically determined time, and touring the jewellers and watchmakers of London selling them time-checks. Her mother had taken on the task when she was widowed, in the 1850s; Ruth took her place from 1892.

By 1908, when she was the subject of a flurry of press interest, Ruth Belville already seemed an anachronistic curiosity. She should, everyone assumed, have been replaced by modern, telegraph-based electronic synchronisation. But that was expensive, and of variable reliability. Miss Belville, by contrast, charged very reasonably, and always turned up. Her market niche still existed.

The surprise is that Belville continued to make her rounds until 1940, well into the age of the radio and the speaking clock, supported by tradition-minded jewellers. David Rooney draws from this the moral I have taken as the title of my post. The past is still with us, just unevenly distributed, and for the best of reasons. "Stuff endures" - Rooney's nice phrase - because of the inertial power of human affection, and because arrangements can continue to yield rewards even if their original rationale has disappeared.

I have come to suspect that my own job, as a subeditor, is another example of the phenomenon. Subediting - the cutting, polishing and headlining of journalistic text as a separate job - was a natural corollary of hot-metal publishing, in which it was an essential gearing mechanism between reporters and the intricate, inflexible machinery their work drove. Ever since hot metal went, managers and consultants have sought to abolish subs; and yet subs have endured. They have been too useful and too well-established to be easily dispensed with. Those final corrections, that last touch of polish on the writing, all that minute coordination of detail and timing - it's hard to suddenly do without.

Which might give me new hope for my career, except for the fact that stuff doesn't endure for ever. We can't know whether it's 1908 or 1940. But it feels increasingly like 1940. That's what haunts me about Ruth Belville.

Scene-setting

Rye Lane, in Peckham, south London - where I moved a month ago, and regained internet access this morning - has at least two distinct characters as a commercial street.

On the one hand, it's a forcing ground for small businesses, mostly run by and for the local African community. These shops are busy and various, but margins must be tight and turnover rapid, because many traders don't get around to installing their own signs; we have a grocer apparently called "Big Girl Clothing Company". This aspect of Rye Lane is most evident towards the southern end.

On the other hand, clustered at the north, and matching Rye Lane's character as about the busiest stretch in Peckham, there are the chain stores: Boots, Argos, Currys, Carphone Warehouse, WH Smith.

At the transitional point between the two Rye Lanes, on opposite sides of the street, two people ply their trades most Saturday afternoons.

One is a preacher with a megaphone. An Islamic preacher, although because his diction is not brilliant it took me some time to be sure of that. He seems embattled, even by the standards of street preachers - many of the rooms above the shops are occupied by vigorous little Pentecostal churches - but he isn't giving up.

The other is a woman in a jester's hat, who twists thin balloons into obscene-looking toy swords. By the end of the day you sometimes see small children swordfighting; the loser is presumably the one whose sword bursts.

I think I'm going to like it here.

Street View abecedary: J is for John, but which John?

Strange how, at least if you're as word-obsessed as me, a view can rearrange itself around a piece of lettering. This stretch of Stockwell Road is in many respects rather generically contemporary, for a long-timescale, fairly cynical value of contemporary: some boxy 60s or 70s flats, a boarded-up shop and a fried-chicken francise - which might be very good, for all I know; there's a branch of the same microchain in Sydenham, but I haven't tried it. And then there are the fading painted advertisements on the gable end, which suddenly anchor the picture in the 40s or 50s:

And in Googlecontext:

View Larger Map

The first product advertised is easy to identify: everyone knows Picture Post. Its photography was famous, and its publication dates place these advertisements somewhere between 1938 and 1957. The second, broken panel is trickier. John who? If it's another magazine, then the obvious answer is John Bull, a popular weekly that seems to have been known at different times for rabble-rousing patriotism and nice illustrations. (The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course.)

Wikipedia is entertainingly vague about John Bull, noting a scatter of dates when it definitely existed and concluding that it "may have closed in 1962". You can do much better with the British Library newspaper catalogue, which traces the main 20th-century carrier of the name - the magazine that was famously edited by Horatio Bottomley - from 1906 to 1958, then through a flurry of minor rebranding as it swallows a couple of other magazines, and then to a relaunch in February 1960 as something called Today, which itself comes to an end without any word of continuation in 1964. John Bull clocks up the best part of 2,800 issues in 54 years, which suggests more or less continuous weekly publication over that span. It's easy to imagine it being advertised alongside Picture Post.

That would have been a nice neat story, and I wish I could fully believe it. I had thought the two magazines shared an ownership, but it looks like that's wrong - Wiki does have Hulton, which owned Picture Post, selling out to Odhams, which owned John Bull, but only after Picture Post had closed. Another piece of evidence is a selection of John Bull covers on sale at the Advertising Archive. These have good, consistent branding, in a series of different serif styles that have little in common with the punchy, jauntily arranged sans on this wall. I suppose it could be a John Bull look from before the Advertising Archives' holdings - those seem to start in 1946 - but it could easily be another John altogether.

You'd need street directories and old photographs to get the full story, I suspect - Google, even with Street View, has its limits. This series will continue to explore them on Wednesday, when my alphabetical hopscotch will land on the letter B.

A Street View abecedary: R is for Regen's

So I was fiddling with Google Street View, and it occurred to me that my long-in-abeyance London letters series, about the lovely vernacular lettering you can see on London's streets, would now be childishly easy to revive: Google has taken all the photographs. No more blurred shots! Or at least, no more blurred shots that are my fault. This could actually be good now.

I'm going to start the new, sinister-global-conglomerate-powered series on Rye Lane, Peckham, a classic slice of shabby south London full of shops and signs of wildly divergent age and type. This is a cropped screengrab of my favourite combination:

And here it is in Googlecontext:

View Larger Map

Now, the first thing I like about this is the hand-cut irregular charm of the sign, and the way it clashes with the intended art-deco sleekness. Look at the difference in emphasis between the upper-case 'R' and the lower-case letters next to it, the strangeness of the lower-case 'g', the extreme slope on 'for', the vestigial apostrophe.

But what makes it treasurable is that, to judge by the scuffing on some of the letters and the mess either side of the panel, this sign has been rescued from behind several erected by later retailers, because the owner of the lingerie shop it now advertises either (i) couldn't be bothered to put up their own sign, and instead just kept peeling back until they hit a nice one; or (ii) is impishly pleased by the description of their wares as "baby linen". Or it could be both. In any case, it's very south London.

Bonus Street View question: is it me, or has Google's privacy-protection bot blurred out the face of the shop dummy on the right?

Two urban notes

1. Ken Livingstone is fortunate in having enemies who can't understand how ANYBODY could POSSIBLY like him. Such people find it difficult to make converts.

2. Postcodes of the bookshops consulted by the Evening Standard for its weekly list of "London's Bestsellers": W1, W1, SW3, NW6, WC1, SW10, N1, W8. Nothing south of the river, nothing east of the City. This may be useful in determining what the Standard generally means by "London".

Road-testing

I cycled out to the Museum in Docklands today, and was surprised to find myself in the future. Here's what it looks like:

That, reader, is a wide, continuous cycle lane for segregated two-way traffic, with dedicated junctions (and, you'll notice, dedicated lights that let bikes set off before cars); in other words, a Ken Livingstone-style cycle corridor, as conceived of by the journalists who have written them up as bike motorways, superhighways, &c &c. It runs from Tower Bridge to the Isle of Dogs (Isle of Dogs to Tower Bridge in the picture above, which was taken on my way home) and it offers a fair preview of both the attractions and the disadvantages of this kind of scheme.

Plus points

1) It feels incredibly swift and non-scary. This would be a wonderfully soft introduction to cycling in London.

2) There's usually a kerb separating you from the pavement, which stops pedestrians wandering across and eliminates the live-Frogger aspect of your standard London off-road cycle path, which is either officially shared use or effectively shared-used because the only segregation is fading paint, making it slow and tricky for cyclists and scary for pedestrians.

3) It's pretty much impossible to get lost once you've found the path. None of your usual chipped-paint-splodge-to-indicate-sharp-right-down-otherwise-unmarked-side-road nonsense. This is a cycle route you can get right first time without going at walking pace or developing psychic powers.

Minus points

1) It still does the classic cycle-lane thing of forcing you to ride dangerously close to junctions, so that you can't see any traffic approaching from the side and the approaching traffic can't see you. The markings give the cycle track priority, but cars were coming through without stopping anyway; that enthusiastic novice cyclist I was imagining at point 1) above might well end up as a kebab.

2) You can definitely still get lost on your way to the main route: rejoining the track from Limehouse meant navigating a complete mess of "CYCLIST DISMOUNT" signs and apparent instructions to ride on unmarked pavement; I ended up walking my bike back up the one-way street that comes off the track to Limehouse. Ken's superhighways will only be as good as the connections to them; which, on past evidence, means not very good at all.

3) It's no use making something a cycle highway if you're going to let highway engineers treat it like a pavement. On the way back, a hefty chunk of super-cycle-route was simply closed, with no diversion marked; with no obvious place to turn off, even. The solution taken by all the cyclists I saw was simply to use the part of the road dedicated to cars, which meant cycling the wrong way up a one-way street. That was what I did, too, because there were so many people doing it that I thought at first I must have misread the markings, and I got too far to turn back. (Cycle routes in general go from being moderately helpful to catastrophically unhelpful when they have roadworks and no suggestion for a quiet way around them - and a hell of a lot of routes seem to be in that state at the moment.)

Clever Perec sell

This "staff pick" card, found in an Islington bookshop, pimps A Void, Adair's virtuoso translation of La Disparition, in words that honour its famous lipogrammatical constraint. OK, so that's not a wholly original trick - a critic or two had a go at it on first publication - but it's still not a thing that many of us would think to try in such tight conditions. Bravo Adam, I say.

In lieu of a postcard

"And the city is situated on hills; you are hurrying along somewhere and all at once beneath your feet you have a deep green chasm with a fine river below; you are taking a walk and all of a sudden there is another street located on a bridge above your head, as at Genoa; you are taking a walk, and you reach a perfectly circular open space, as at Paris. The whole time there is something for you to be surprised at." - Karel Capek on the wonders of wandering around Edinburgh, in Letters from England.

[Letters from England, by Karel Capek, translated by Paul Selver, London, 1925. The Czech satirist holidays, sending home faux-naive doodles and matching comic prose. The first few chapters, in which he is beaten about the head by London, are much the best; they show a near-Swiftian skill with lists.]

Additional note, in the event of this blog having a Scottish reader: Yes, he is aware that your country is not part of England; no, I don't know why he chooses not to reflect this in his overall title. The translator sounds potentially English; why don't you blame him?

The war on cliche-cliche

Here is the opening of Christopher Ricks's essay on "Cliche" in State of the Language (1980), a fat volume with many surprising authors (Enoch Powell! Angela Carter! Randolph Quirk! Something for everyone!) that I bought purely for the pleasure of this quote:

The only way to speak of a cliche is with a cliche. So even the best writers against cliches are awkwardly placed. When Eric Partridge amassed his Dictionary of Cliches in 1940 (1978 saw its fifth edition), his introduction had no choice but to use the usual cliches for cliches. Yet what, as a metaphor, could be more hackneyed than hackneyed, more outworn than outworn, more tattered than tattered? Is there any point left to - or in or on - saying of a cliche that its "original point has been blunted"? Hasn't this too become blunted? A cliche is "a phrase 'on tap' as it were" - but, as it is, is Partridge's "as it were" anything more than a cool pretence that when, for his purposes, he uses the cliche on tap it's oh so different from the usual bad habit of having those two words on tap? His indictment of "fly-blown phrases" has no buzz of insect wings, no weight of carrion.

Even George Orwell (whom William Empson, with an audacious compacting of cliches, called the eagle eye with the flat feet) - even Orwell had to use the cliche-cliches (hackneyed, outworn), and could say, "There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could be similarly got rid of if people would interest themselves in the job," without apparently being interested himself in whether fly-blown wasn't itself one of those metaphors which could be got rid of.

Ricks goes on to argue that writers can make intelligent, meaning-reviving use of cliche, quoting examples from Geoffrey Hill and, inevitably, Bob Dylan. "Cliches invite you not to think - but you may always decline the invitation, and what could better invite a thinking man to think?" I can't think of a better invitation, if you regularly wax sarcastic about writing, to think harder about the terms you use to do it.

[State of the Language, edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, California, 1980. You want this one, not the disappointing Faber-published sequel dated 1990. I bought my copy from the revived Skoob, now buried under the Brunswick Centre. Presumably a more prominent space would detract from the parade of expensive chain stores that make good, in a bad way, on the centre's claim to be "a high street for Bloomsbury". No matter: the basement shop has a decent amount of space, the lighting's good enough that you don't much miss the windows, the range of books is as wonderful as ever and there's now an official Skoob Glob. And they have a second copy of State of the Language (1980), if you're interested...]

Around town

The British Library has just opened Sacred, a large and reverent exhibition of holy manuscripts designed to show the common roots of the Abrahamic faiths. It has also just positioned security men to check your bag as you go into the building. I would so love to live in a world where those two facts seemed unlikely to be connected.

(Disclaimer: I haven't actually been in to Sacred yet, by the way, so I can't guarantee that its reverence is total; was at the BL for other reasons that may result in a further post here.)

Experiments in everyday life

Having bought a shelving unit the other day (this one - notice Muji's sensible, if selfish, policy of only delivering items it would be simple to carry home in the first place), I can confirm two things:

i) If you walk down Oxford Street attempting to stabilise a heavy, tilting 8ft-long package with one hand and gripping a shopping bag and an umbrella with the other, you will still be offered free papers.

ii) Faced with an obviously out-of-depth person attempting to transport a heavy 8ft-long package, the bus passengers of south-east London are incredibly kind, helpful and tolerant, and manage hardly to snigger at all.

London letters 4: Hat factory, Hollen Street

This is the Henry Heath Hat Factory, a fragment of the old artisan Soho jammed right up against Oxford Street:

What's shown is the back; the front was presumably a shop even in Victorian times. The building, according to listing records, dates from the late 1880s, but the address dates back further than that. There's a pamphlet in the British Library's Evanion Collection of printed ephemera that was handed out at the 1884 International Health Exhibition in South Kensington - they had a demonstration there - and gives the firm's address as "Ye Hatterie", Oxford Street, "as in the reign of King George the Fourth".

The pamphlet is marvellous. It boasts of Henry Heath's contribution to "rational dress" (a "soft-fitting" riding hat for ladies, as recommended by the coursing correspondent of The Field) and his warrant as "Hat Manufacturer to King Alphonso and the Royal Court of Spain".

But the reason I wanted to write about this is because of the letters themselves, plain cast-iron-looking Victorian sans forms that are constantly struggling to turn back into something more complicated. Look at the crossbars of the "H" and "A" in "HAT":

You get the same effect on "Oxford Street". It's trying to be simple, but serifs keep breaking out - on the "r"s, on the "S", on the "t"...

As you'd expect, the building is now full of "creative" "industry" offices. I hope some of the occupants are sufficiently geeky about lettering to enjoy it.

A small mystery

This afternoon, I was overtaken by a car bearing a sticker that said

Beckenham Rugby Club

Where rugby comes first

which was slightly puzzling. What's the alternative, when you're running a rugby club? What is the other option that they're silently excluding?

Is it a dig at some rival organisation?

Beckenham Rugby Club

Catford Rugby Club mostly play tiddlywinks these days. The big girls

Or is it a quiet protest against political correctness gone mad?

Beckenham Rugby Club

Forget all that "Try not to break his neck" nonsense

Or, most worrying of all, is it a coded warning to the (stereo)typical amateur rugby enthusiast?

Beckenham Rugby Club

We don't have a bar

London letters 3: Library, Forest Hill

I am away for the next couple of days, so this week's "regular" feature will have to be early instead of late: here is the exuberant eruption of swashes that announces Forest Hill Library (map), and also the confidence once felt by the borough of Lewisham: you are looking at 1900 (August, according to the opening-ceremony plaque), the London County Council newly created but its subdivisions still holding most of the real power.

Underneath, cropped out, is an eighties-looking blue plastic sign that repeats the information in white-and-yellow Futura, either because the council's corporate image must be enforced or because messages become invisible over a certain level of age and ornateness.

Next week I promise to get further from home, and maybe even do some damn research.

A world without Borders

Borders has never meant all that much to me as a bookshop. In the early stages, at least, of the chain's UK operation, if your town was big enough to have a Borders it was big enough to have somewhere three times better. But if it does disappear - there's talk of a management buy-out - I'll miss it hugely.

This isn't because of the pious, we-need-retail-variety argument, although that's true. There are two main reasons.

The first is that Borders open late, which is unorthodox for British bookshops, and very useful. If you want a "third place" (ick) at 8pm that isn't a pub or a restaurant, it's going to be Borders. Get stood up at a pub - doesn't have to be a date; it can be a friend struggling with work or public transport - and you* get through several drinks, while feeling increasingly freakish. Your prize is a tincture of tipsy self-hatred and a complete set of smokelogged clothes. Get stood up at Borders and you browse the books, read all the sane bits of this month's Atlantic, maybe buy a coffee in remorse. Your prize is a head full of the not-quite-higher journalism and possibly a latte moustache. You will still smell however you normally smell. I will miss being stood up in Borders.

The second thing, already hinted at, is that Borders is the best chain newsagent in Britain by the length of Charing Cross Road. This week's Press Gazette has a double-spread of independent magazines in panic at the thought that the main outlet that cares about them might disappear. Borders stocks British magazines that our own lovely newsagents couldn't give a bugger about. There are a lot of those. I remember when I was first trying to make myself a proper smartarse, about 1996, the epic struggle it was to buy even mainstream political and literary periodicals (the New Statesman, the LRB) in Nottingham. WH Smith was no help. There was one shop with a serious range - Briddocks, which was a tiny place full of spinners bearing the names of long-defunct hi-fi magazines, and turned out not to be long for this world itself. It might have them if you arrived early enough in the week. Heaven help you if you ended up in a town you didn't know, and had to find the one newsagent behind the many identical frontages that considered it worthwhile to stock the TLS.

Borders has all that stuff as a matter of course, plus all the British stuff I didn't then know about, plus a huge range of systematic US imports - which might disappear even if the UK management can get their buy-out together. They have provoked a lot of other bookshops to take magazines a bit more seriously - I think Waterstone's had some before the Borders threat appeared, but it made them bring in more; Blackwell's and Foyles have both sprouted groaning magazine shelves - but no one else does it as well. I will miss all that. Badly.

*Yes, all right, me.

London letters 2: Dead shops, Elephant

For the second in my new self-indulgent visual series - yes, you're right, I should be on to the third, but I forgot - we go from Edwardian to a 60s/70s "eclectic" style that includes fake Edwardian; an altogether sadder class of period detail.

This aggressively cheery lettering appears on the corner of a first-floor parade of shops in the Heygate Estate, off Brandon Street, Elephant and Castle. The Heygate was completed in 1974 and, if all goes to plan, will be demolished by 2009. The Evening Standard listed it last year as one of London's ten worst architectural horrors, describing it as the "prime example of a failed Seventies estate".

I imagine there's still a terrifying launderette in there somewhere, but I don't know if there was ever a butcher - the signage looks as if it could have come straight from a 1960s artist's impression. It certainly no longer reflects what's on the parade: a school of martial arts, a couple of council or council-and-police-and-probation-service offices, and one of those idealistic probably-doomed community cafes that parades like this tend to attract.

Could be worse, then. Probably has been. But still, depending on your temperament, either heart-breaking or blood-boiling.

Update: I cycled past here again the other day, and I had remembered the shops a bit wrong. It goes: martial arts school, storefront church, "Elephant Enterprises" (not sure what that is, but it doesn't appear to be the kind of shop that opens on Saturdays), Youth Inclusion Project, Heygate Cafe. There is more non-council life there than I allowed. But there are still none of the neighbourhood shops that the architects appear to have envisaged for their street in the sky.

Skyline questions

Those who complain that the scale of the Westminster skyline has been outraged by the high-rise interlopers ignore the fact that cold measurements or even hotly angry ones are not everything - not necessarily anything much. What could dwarf that marvellous monster the Victoria tower, but something of its own kind?

When Barry reared his Neo-Gothic palace against the Abbey, the traditional ruler of the Westminster skies for so many centuries, that was true audacity. Both survive as mighty presences, the real abbey and that newer Nightmare Abbey of genius, ruling the scene unmoved by the lofty impotent giants surrounding it. Nothing much counts for much, or intrudes much. The Festival Hall complex, so alluring by night, fades by day into a range of concrete barns: almost a modern agricultural aspect, a Harvest Festival Hall. Next to it the vast inert face of the Shell building expresses total absence. But Wren's surviving churches, however small, refuse to be extinguished. They ignore monsters; they spike the scene like exlamation marks, commanding attention. And wherever you happen to be sailing or driving or walking, whether you are as near as Southwark or as far as Greenwich, St Paul's pops up all over the skyline like a floating bubble nobody can burst. If it had been anchored in a vista, as its creator intended, that dome would never have had the same capricious and buoyant appeal.

- Norman Shrapnel, A View of the Thames

This is 1977, and Norman Shrapnel assumes his readers will be "on the side of sensible planning", "the most careful and tenacious of co-ordinated schemes". The world that he is gently writing against was already disappearing, but he isn't to know that.

In 2007, those bubblings-up of St Paul's are "protected vistas" - we need planning to protect the appearance of serendipity. I'm not sure what the moral is, except that conventional wisdom is more fluid than it can sometimes seem. We go on making mistakes, but not always the same ones.

[A view of the Thames, by Norman Shrapnel, London, 1977. Late-career ruminations by a former parliamentary sketchwriter of the Guardian, in a lovely version of the paper's old C.E Montague-derived heightened colloquial style. Less deep-thinking than the creaminess of the prose would suggest, but it gives a nice picture of the docklands between death and redevelopment, and an engaging selection of the river's urban myths. The picture, incidentally, is the City seen from the ramp down to the debating chamber in City Hall; the pre-20th-century element seems pretty effectively expunged from that particular vista.]