Fragments of my memories

London; Your name seems familiar but I don’t recognise your face.

It crept up on me slowly when many of those places I passed every day were no longer there.

Gone were those old cafes, signs, buildings and shops that inhabited my peripheral vision, the personal wallpaper of life that meant so much to me. 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 all with lame public sculpture outside, carefully signposted for the best photo opportunity.

Now I walk like a ghost, through a bland gimcrack weekend tourist stop-off that is still my home city and I know that every inhabitant before has mourned the passing of their own London.