There's a point on my daily journey to the office, when I step from one world and into another. It's not marked or sign-posted, this is n't being ferried across the Styx, it's quieter, but it tells stories in it's own fashion. The one I read Monday to Friday when I'm passing through is clear cut: how affluence has the ability to slip into an area of no especial beauty - let's call them rough diamonds - and remould it, polish it, until it's a different shape; it's an environmental change without anything really structural happening. Buildings stay the same, or at least the exteriors do, interiors are always in flux. A time traveller coming to visit the area from fifty years ago would still recognise the streets, they would still be able to navigate.

But if they walked these streets, would they find kindred spirits now? Doubtful. That world is buried. Reborn as something else. As the newspaper shops, grocers and general shops have fallen one by one to galleries, exquisite kitchen shops and glamourous dress shops, so has the demographics. The old audience is gone; it's bankers and high flying city people now. There's always a brace or two of chauffeurs parked on the streets, engines idling, in the morning. Everything around Clarendon Cross (and this is the transition zone) completely reflects their sentiments and tastes. Just one place vaguely of any value for the mythical time-traveller of fifty years ago: a stately galleon of a wine bar. They could get a drink there, at least.

There are still flakes of the past that swirl by on occasion. I ran into a flurry some time ago, it was early in the morning and I'd just stepped into this new world. Outside the remnants of an old shop, now a house, I could see an old man in slippers and wearing pyjamas, with a coat thrown over his shoulders, the front door open. He came towards me, looking bewildered and lost, I remember for no particular reason his long grey whiskers; pointing to his watch, he asked me if the banks were open. No, they would n't be for hours, I said. Are you ok? Do you want me to take you home? I asked. I'm fine, you go to work, he replied. He was n't, he was a man lost in another world. I waited a few moments and he eventually returned to the doorway of his house.

I have n't seen him since - I hope he's well and in good care - he mentioned he lived with his sister.

He was from an older era, before gentrification, I could tell that. I wondered and still do, whether he hears the sounds of today, or is it the images and sounds of an earlier Clarendon Cross buried into the walls and bricks he's hearing. I've written about streets having ghosts before, memories, things are soaked into the walls and pavement, which are only audible and visible to whoever it was who experienced them originally, but they are there, they don't go.