London really is a beautiful city. It is, perhaps, at it’s most beautiful at dusk on a chilly late autumn afternoon, when the street lights are just starting to come on. Mind you, pretty much anywhere is beautiful at that time, particularly the inside of a good pub, or home. Yet that is when the city takes on a special type of beauty, especially here in the east, and down by the river. I was just walking back from Woolwich: I was on one of my exploratory strolls, and decided to try to find an alternative route home. I found a path by the Thames – out there it is wide and majestic; one gets the impression that you’re in an ancient landscape. The buildings look old, as if they belong to a time long gone, and indeed they were. The heyday of Woolwich was the late nineteenth century, when London was the capital of a vast empire: if you go down the high street, the shops look kind of shabby, but if you look up to their first floor windows, you can see the buildings the shops now inhabit were once finely decorated. For that place was once the centre for boat building, and thus a centre of wealth and trade

Walking home this evening I crossed over the entrances of the old docks and slipways, log since abandoned and forgotten, and they stuck me with a melancholy beauty. Cities like Paris have a beauty that strikes you instantaneously, taking your breath away with the poetry of its layout and architecture, yet while central London does indeed have some stunning buildings, the beauty of this city is one that takes time to find. It’s beauty is a kind of melancholic timelessness which you can only experience once you have lived here a while; it only it you from time to time, like when you’re by the river at Woolwich, but which every cockney has a sense of.