‘Hopefully we’ll get a better view from the bridge,’ he said, striding off. But the bridge over the railway lines and sidings was enclosed by grey steel walls and caged in at the top, making a vandal-proof chute straight out of an abattoir. Or into one. The stairs down from the bridge were clogged with litter and weeds that had graduated into shrubbery, making me wonder if people ever came here, and who might be responsible for maintaining this miserable outpost. As soon as this thought formed, I had to revise it. Of course people came here, people worked here, did they not? Many people. All around were places of work: logistics centres and cement plants and, ahead, Barking power station. Even legit, old-school factories. Maybe the workers all drove in, rather than chance the twice-an-hour trains. Maybe they used buses instead. From where? Were there buses? So many of my fellow Londoners were, I realised, a mystery to me. Where did they live? The question: how did they make it work? All I knew was that I didn’t have to duck past Triassic overgrowth on my morning journey from Pimlico to Shoreditch.

‘I forget how big London is,’ I said. ‘You go to, say, Docklands, and you think you’re near the edge. But you aren’t. There’s all of this. Miles more.’

Pierce smiled and squinted at his surroundings. ‘If I ever want to shoot a zombie movie, I know where to come,’ he said. It was the most interesting thing he had said since we set out, this humdrum observation, and it was fundamentally wrong. The footbridge and roadside had an air of desuetude and abandonment, it’s true. But human activity was everywhere: a constant exchange of lorries up and down the road, the sounds of industry and the wail of the motorway. A steady metallic banging came from somewhere up ahead, and there was a general non-traffic growl of machinery and work. But no human voice, no people on foot.

To aggravate the go-away vibe of the place, a freezing drizzle began to fall. As we walked it worsened, enough for us to keep our heads down and our mouths closed.

Like the Ford factory, Barking power station was thoroughly free of awe or interest: flat, featureless blue slabs of building, and squat chimneys that issued no smoke. In any case, anything that they did produce would be quite redundant compared with the mountain of smoke rising across the way. We were close enough to see that the plume had its own shuddering orange illumination, but any actual flames were obscured by the sheds along the road.