The security guys at Canary Wharf might have been slightly puzzled earlier today. They may well have noticed a man using a powerchair wearing a red cap seemingly wandering around the mall for hours. He apparently didn’t buy anything, but just wander around the mall, a look of awe tinged with revulsion constantly on his face. Unlike the thousands of other customers there, going about their usual Sunday morning business, the man appeared to be exploring the mall as if it were new and totally alien to him.

What the security guards wouldn’t have realised was that the man in the red cap was attempting to comprehend the magnitude of the landscape about him: He had in fact been to Canary Wharf several times before, yet each time had found himself awestruck at the fact that such a cathedral of capitalistic opulence could have risen out of a handful of decaying docks in just forty years. He was both amazed and disgusted at the collection of chic boutiques connected by a maze of arcades, all lying beneath a growing forest of glittering metallic skyscrapers. That such a transformation could have happened was at once utterly remarkable, but also slightly perverse.

Only here in London could such revivals take place and areas receive such investment. Thus I find myself wondering through those shopping arcades and around those docks, trying to imagine what that area must have been like fifty or a hundred years ago. The sheer opulence of the place makes my eyes grow wide: it is at once awesome and perverse, welcoming and intimidating, an awesome asset of a great world city and a sickening testament to the preferential treatment London gets over the rest of the country.