Behind a cordon of polished hoardings, under spotlights, two demolition machines were tearing at the slab block, ripping it down piece by piece. Their long jointed necks were wrapped in strings of coloured lights, and the hydraulic jaws that were chewing through ferroconcrete were painted to resemble dinosaur heads. A window popped from its frame and smashed onto the hillock of rubble below, and some in the crowd whooped; with a snap and a twang, a section of floor broke away, bringing down a strip of facade as it slumped, and the punters roared.

The hoardings around the demolition site were covered in images of lush primordial greenery, overlaid with further inspiring slogans: SAY FAREWELL TO THE OLD … CELEBRATE THE NEW. Castle Park is coming. The next era in urban evolution. Register your interest today.

One of the Renewosaurs was worrying a structural support loose, tugging it back and forth to splinter the concrete away from the steel rebar underneath. The slow, cracking action made me run my tongue over my teeth. My mouth was dry.

‘I can’t fucking believe it,’ Pierce said quietly. ‘This is … This place always seemed, I don’t know, indestructible. Like it would always be there, good or bad.’

‘You never wanted to come here,’ I said. ‘It was terrifying to you.’

His jaw muscles tensed. ‘Yeah … But it was part of the city; it was real, not like …’ He nodded towards the throng of beards and checked shirts.

This lament for the dirtier, more dangerous city of thirty years ago was familiar Pierce territory, echoed in all his books and Vice pieces. And I was sympathetic to those angry, melancholy swipes against the rising tide of glass and waistcoated private security and Byron burgers. They had made me a fan of his. I had been sympathetic, before I knew the truth about Night Traffic. But that city had been before my time. I had been a child, growing up two hours away (by the faster train), where the whole of London was an exquisite, hazardous mystery. I was fascinated by a prior London I had never seen myself. I thought I was angry about that London disappearing – as angry as Pierce. But what if I was not? What if I was angry, and sad, about something else, and London was no more than a setting?

‘You think they should have kept the estate as it was?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’ Pierce fired back. ‘I bet the buildings were sound. Beautiful, in their way.’ He turned his gaze to what remained of the slab block, stretching back to the entrance of Winterzone.

‘But it was a sink estate,’ I said. ‘Crime. Neglect. Uninhabitable.’

‘People lived here, though, didn’t they?’ Pierce snarled. ‘And where are they now? Not fucking here, that’s for sure, not in this fucking crowd.’