These are dark economic times, but London seems, in some areas at least, to running very strongly against the tide.

There is an incredible surge in building across all points of the compass; Stratford has the Olympic site rising up like a giant mushroom after the morning rain; the City is almost in some form building extremis, it's either raising skywards like the Pinnacle and The Shard, with more skyscrapers in between those, or it's coming down to make way for another. Builder's dust in the City is now as ever-present as sand in the Sahara.

We have a brand rail line in process of being threaded like a shoe lace around, through, and mostly underground London. The streets are going to be open trenches for years.

I love the sense of living in an ever changing urban landscape. Nothing's static. An ancient city still marching forward, contours and skylines altering by the second. It's still the urban jungle feel; what's going to behind that next corner.

Yet, even inside this whirling ball of dust, steel beams, noise, closed off streets, diggers and cranes, nature seemingly thrives and if it's anything to go by what I saw yesterday by the Tower of London, making a comeback. In the evening sky, I saw a rolling, moiling vortex of Starlings pirouette for several minutes over the Minories. I love those birds.