Just to illustrate what I was talking about yesterday, I’d like everyone to take a look at this. It’s a photo of the Iceland shop in Eltham high street. It caught my interest when I was up there earlier. You can clearly see that there are two distinct layers to the building: the bottom layer is, obviously, a pretty standard modern food shop. Yet above that are the remains of the building which the shop is built into: a much older building built in 1905. According to this history website, it was originally the building of David Greig, a provision merchant. I find it intriguing how, in London, so many of the things necessary for the metropolis to function as a modern city are now built into fragments of the past, so that you can often see past and present at the same time. With it’s shimmering modern shop front under two old, Edwardian balconies, I think this is a great illustration of that.