‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Henry Pyke, Coopertown, that cycle courier, lots of frustration – but that’s everyone in the big city, ain’t it, Mr Punch? And what percentage actually let you in? I bet you’ve got a piss-poor success rate – so you can just fuck off out of it – I’m going home to bed.’

At that point I realised that the train was moving again, the lights were up and the man in the blue blazer didn’t have his hand down my trousers. The ranting drunk was silent. Everybody in the carriage was studiously not looking at me.

I bailed at Kentish Town, the very next stop. Fortunately it was where I wanted to go.

From September 1944 to March 1945, that lovable Nazi scamp Wernher Von Braun aimed his V2 rockets at the stars and yet, in the words of the song, somehow hit London instead. When my dad was growing up, the city was dotted with bombsites, gaps in the neat rows of houses where homes had been obliterated. In the postwar years these sites were gradually cleared and rebuilt in a series of ghastly architectural mistakes. My dad liked to claim that the mistake where I grew up was built on a V2 impact site, but I suspect it was probably just an ordinary cluster of German high explosives dropped by a conventional bomber.

Still, whatever caused the two-hundred-metre gap in the Victorian terraces lining Leighton Road, the postwar planners weren’t going to pass up an opportunity to make mistakes on this scale. Built in the 1950s, the blocks of the Peckwater Estate are six storeys high, rectangular and constructed, as a final aesthetic touch, of a dirty grey brick that weathered badly. As a result, when the clean air act put an end to the famous London pea-soupers and they started sand-blasting the old buildings clean, the Peckwater Estate came out looking worse than it had before.

The flats were solidly built, so at least I didn’t grow up listening to next door’s live docusoap, but they were built on the dubious assumption, so beloved of post-war planners, that the London working class was composed entirely of hobbits. My parents had a third-floor flat with a front door that opened onto an open-air walkway. When I’d been growing up, in the early 1990s, the walls had been covered in graffiti and the stairwell with dogshit. These days the graffiti was mostly gone and the dogshit got regularly hosed into the gutter which, by the standards of the Peckwater Estate, counted as gentrification. I still had my front-door key, which was just as well because when I got there I found my parents were out.