WILL SELF: The lockdown is bringing London’s history back to life

...I’ve been pondering this matter again the past month, when taking my government-sanctioned daily exercise. With massively reduced motor traffic – both on the ground, and in the heavens – the notoriously polluted London air has grown clearer and cleaner; and towards the small hours, the streets are almost completely empty. A couple of nights ago, I heard a nightingale sing in Kennington Lane. I myself haven’t been in a car or on the Tube for a month now – instead walking everywhere. Each night, I head out with my partner, and we quarter and re-quarter the unfashionable regions for an hour or so. At the end of our road lies the Brixton Road, and here is one of those “long lines of dull brick houses” – in fact, an elegant terrace built in the 1820s. ...

... Indeed, after a month’s walking, breathing and listening to the muted sough of the night-time city, I believe we’ve managed to invent a time machine just as imaginatively compelling as that of Conan Doyle’s contemporary, HG Wells. Shorn of their economic significance, and their workaday salience, the buildings erected subsequent to the Regency retreat into the sodium-tinged gloom – while those elegant terraces that remain, hoist up their brick petticoats and step forward. If we walk past Kennington Park then turn into Cleaver Square, and from there head down Kennington Lane, before turning left into Walnut Tree Walk, we can remain entirely within this strange zone, one prior to the great industrialisation of space-time that arrived, together with the railways, from the 1840s on. ...