What makes a great street? Why do some streets soar and swoop with incidents and stories and etch themselves into untold numbers of consciousness whilst others don't?

And it's glib to say that it's down to location: heart of the city streets can be as cold and unrewarding as we would automatically expect a street near a canal or tucked away on some quiet industrial estate to be.

But it's a fact: some streets have it and others don't - heart-racing, chest-fluttering excitement that's seeped into the stones and buildings and soaked up by thousands, millions of people paying homage to a great street, wandering it's surfaces, dazzled by it's stories told and yet to be.

Where are the great streets ? Those sirens luring us from all points of the compass, calling, pulling, imploring...I have a list of favourites, and in no order of precedence, they appear merely as they come to mind:

• 2nd Avenue NYC, especially that slice between 56th and 44th street; the buildings are low in stature for New York; yet enormous in character, buildings that seem to have popped fully formed out of an Edward Hopper painting but with vivacity and life. The sky is always different over this street, always; cobalt blue modulating to a milky white at the edges.

• Beale Street - Home of the blues

• Champs Elysee - a glissade, virtually perfectly linear, bright as Capri sunshine during the day, bathed with elegant light during the night. A cascade of brake lights and horns and a never -ending jumble of people. I love it; I love being surrounded by humanity.

• Oxford Street - loathe it...yes, of course I do...but find some way of tearing me away from it. I'm sunk into the tar of the road, it's my footsteps pattering on the pavement hour after hour.

Now for a lesser known. Then should the term great street be solely the mark of a major thoroughfare, great is subjective, it's what you make of it, and here's my other great street:

• Kensington High Street - no other street in London has as much of me in it's DNA as this. Every paving stone holds a memory, every twist and kink in the street an adventure. My life in London unfolds along this street like a never-ending film. The sacred flame of my happiest ever time burns here along this street in a small wine bar. Unforgettable.

What are the great streets is as crucial to now and understand as it is to explain what makes them what they are. What are yours?