Back in London it was decidedly different - gin-palaces, saloons, beef and mutton, and mutton and beef on every side. Men and women fighting one another to live. The juggernaut car of money dragged through the streets while virtue and innocence fell under its wheels.

The canal - a man steps forward two steps towards the water. He smiles because of the day. ‘Don’t jump, haha!’ I say. Under the bridge and round the bend, there on a bench, I see his three friends. They’re red and grey with yellow hair, brown scabs on their faces. Faces shiny and flakey, they’re crumpled up and happy because of the day, and ten cans of Special Brew. And I hear him say ‘not yet’.

From his home at Mallon House, Carr St, Limehouse, Beackon was able to tap into the powerful leyline running through his front room. This leyline is readily visible from the observatory at Greenwich. It goes through the macabre Queen Anne house, and guided by the symmetry of the Naval College it crosses the Isle of Dogs clipping the corner of the Canary Wharf complex before exactly passing through the tower of St. Anne’s Limehouse. Then it passes through Beackon’s lair before going onto Queen Mary and Westerfield College.

Buskers, beggars, hard looking black boys and skinheads with union jack tattoos, art students who look like skin-heads, dm’s squeaking. Cars, buses, taxis, streetcorner newspaper sellers, vegans, communists selling broad-sheets, Pakistani girls in purple saris, an Hassidic Jew walking to work at Hatton Garden, litter, the smell of the daytime pub wafting out onto the street - beer, cigarettes, betting shop, prison, burger wrappers and crushed glass.

They spun on their heels to face the excitement of the city’s unskinned heart, its glittering towers and monuments. The moment was postponed, the pleasure sharpened. But not prolonged. They plunged once more by Percival Street, by Goswell, St John, Farringdon; the same tracks, towards the known enclosures, the sanctuaries of power. The city was a museum of itself.