Fragments of my memories

London; Your name seems familiar but I don’t recognise your face.
There comes a time in your life, when many of those places you pass every day are no longer there.
Gone are those old cafes, signs, buildings and shops that inhabit your peripheral vision, the personal wallpaper of your life that mean so much to you. As the strata of past occupants is swept away in the name of progress, so my personal city becomes a much sadder place. London has become a pastiche of itself,  a scrubbed up city of fake Victorian gas lamps, corporate chains and identikit office developments with a lame public sculpture outside; then all carefully signposted for the best photo opportunity.
Now I walk like a ghost, through the bland gimcrack weekend tourist stop-off that is my home city and I know that every inhabitant before has mourned the passing of their own London.