For me one of the most intriguing things about living in London is trying to work out what was here before the city. Rolling around the streets of the suburbs, especially here south of the river, I feel a sense of history. The place is a maze, a higgledy-piggledy mess of streets which could have only come into being if the place had built up over time. As I wrote a coupe of days ago, this gives rise to all kinds of fascinating combinations: ancient churches butt up to modern towerblocks; victorian terraces suddenly end, having been partially knocked down in order to make way for duel carriageways. The result is a palimpsest, a fast-fading echo of what was there and is no more. Fascinatingly, in some places, I think I can see the ghost of the hedge-rows of the fields which must once have been here. Old maps from the time of Pepys show this area surrounded by them: Charlton was once a village, miles from the town of london. Those fields have now disappeared under concrete and brick, replacing farm and river with a vast metropolitan labyrinth. And yet sometimes you can still see it – if ou look hard enough, you can still tell where the old hedges and lanes once lay. Thats perhaps why, whenever I go to Woolwich, I get the uncanny feeling I’m walking between fields as I once did in cheshire.