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And yet to look at some of the housing round the Elephant and Castle, and in the sunshine, one almost sees Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine, almost hears the whirr of a little biplane in a cloudless sky and the hum of 'fast cars' on that unencumbered 'special elevated motor track'.

My pace quickens along the New Kent Road to the lamentable pink monolith, set amidst a tumult of traffic, dominated by the dramatic blocks by Erno Goldfinger. The Heygate estate, the Elephant and Castle, they don't daunt me; these are just part of a challenging terrain. They are appalling, but they appall me no more than a tricky crag would deter the rambler with a Wainewright guide in the pocket of his anorak. For I am that rambler. I just do my orienteering in the thick of the city; and now, just as my outdoor confrere reaches into his haversack for rations, I go down underground to eat tacos at a Mexican stall in the bowels of the Elephant and Castle.

I have always had an intense relationship with London, intense and vague as "London" could only be for a child who had hardly ever been there; really only in tow as a toddler. But I had images from the wireless; In Town Tonight early in the fifties. Am I right in remembering the programme began with the traffic roaring until bidden by a stern voice to halt? Then there were show-biz interviews and other snippets; but the important part of this, the moment I waited for, was the close of the programme when a clipped, Chumleigh-Warnerish voice said "Carry On London!" And I imagined (with what intensity!) an immobilised gridlock around Eros all at once grind thrillingly into motion again; such excitement!

I was about seven at the time. But I had been there once when I was four and stayed with my grandmother in a big house in Campden Hill Square full of shuttered rooms with furniture under dust sheets. She took me on the first day to the London Museum, then in Kensington Gardens. Each day, for three days after that I made her take me to the same museum for only one thing: to see the model of the Fire of London. I can see the glass case now with tinny little mechanical flames darting up and down between tiny gabled houses,

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