W2 1BS

            The Westway careers unceasingly onwards towards Central London, never swerving, never stopping; a megalithic concrete gangway channelling A40 traffic on towards the feeding-grounds of the City with a blood-bearing artery’s unfailing pulse. Near Paddington, south of the landscaped relic of an industrial canal turned exclusive lifestyle marina, it intersects with the Edgware Road, an ethnic hubbub of Internet cafés and small supermarkets descending out of the politer climes of Maida Vale. The grocers’, takeaways and restaurants of Edgware Road are owned by a diversity of immigrants from the Middle East; Lebanese, Iraqis, Iranians and Afghans, to mention merely a few. Into the narrow aisles of the supermarkets are crammed a bewildering assortment of imported comestibles: plastic packs of cashews, pistachios, peanuts; beans, lentils, chickpeas; a grainy, protinous mass which will migrate out across the teeming pavements and dissipate amid the steam of a thousand cooking-pots. The shopmen sweat as they unpack the plastic pallets of tins for the high shelves, moving aside courteously to let individual customers pass.

            Nearby, black youth trail clouds of cannabis as they cycle past the high-security premises of Paddington Green Police Station, bantering in hip-hop, whooping through the Joe Strummer Subway. The open-air market on Church Street is winding up for the day; middle-aged men with tightly-coiled black hair labour stolidly to clear their stalls into the backs of white vans while on either side a chaos of schoolchildren and mothers in hijab flows past. Across the road, the drunk man in the wheelchair sits at the entrance to his block of flats, trading sarcastic pleasantries with the people walking by. Smartly dressed Arabic men drive Mercedes into the backlots of their businesses or saunter southwards towards Paddington, towards the coffee shops, where they will sit and smoke their hookahs. On Paddington Green, by the small domed church, office workers and college students occupy benches in the shade of the immense trees as the Westway hurls past them to the south and the fathers play football with their children on the sun-splashed grass. The whole of the Borough of Westminster, with its disparate persons, its zones and its languages, is carrying on its business in the afternoon of this sweaty, crazy day at the long end of summer.

            The buzz from the Westway carries on as afternoon lengthens into evening. The lights in the tower flats blink on in gradual clusters as the people return from their shops and offices. The Edgeware Road pavements are still busy with the flow of traffic to and from its shops and restaurants, a traffic now swollen by the irregular patrols of yawling teenagers. In the open fronts of the stores the accumulated goods, the fruit, the bags of rice, take on a vibrant, electric-lighted bloom against the backdrop of their darkening environment. A vast picture of Kate Moss towers over the Green Man pub and over the neighbouring red-tiled front of the Edgeware Road tube station. This city is not sleeping, but working, and as the night draws on the wail of sirens assures the ear of an eternal vigilance, a ceaseless motion of brains and hands, all moving together in the service of this vast hive, this country of concrete and fibre-optics, which stretches as far north as the suburban normalcy of Potter’s Bar and as far east as the river reaches of Leamouth and Woolwich. The Westway groans on perpetually, a gargantuan mating of earth and sky, while the red lights on the tower blocks flare out like totemic constellations on some ancient map of stars. The city is working, waking through the long night of its unfolding existence, and the car-horns on the Edgeware Road cry out a prayer of thanks to their divinity; to the deity of human commerce and to all its attendant saints of high-street and of cul-de-sac, of backlot and of underpass.