Even though he knew a little about the place’s history, Patel found it hard to imagine this landscape, not full of construction gear and scaffolding, but jostling with the hulls of close-berthed ships, the air black with smoke from a thousand smokestacks, cranes loading and unloading goods: the shipping of an empire filling these man-made harbors and lagoons that had been dredged out of oxbows of the Thames. It had all vanished a long time ago, when Britain stopped being an empire and the mistress of the seas. This whole area had undergone a terrible decline after the war, during which it had been bombed nearly flat, and whatever was left had fallen into decrepitude or ruin. Now it was growing again, office space abruptly mushrooming on the waterside sites where the ships had docked to disgorge their cargoes. Only the street names, and the names of the Docklands stations, preserved the nautical memories: some of the old loading cranes still stood … but the warehouses behind them had been converted to expensive loft apartments. Slim black cormorants fished off Heron Quays, though the quays themselves were gone, slowly being replaced by more apartments and office space: and shining hotels and still more office buildings looked down on waters which were no longer so polluted that it would catch fire if you dropped a match in them.

The train pulled out of Canary Wharf station and headed northwestward away from the towers toward humbler real estate, the “less fortunate” parts of East London which had yet to benefit from the real estate boom in the Docklands. The names of the DLR stations grew less nautical, older: Limehouse, Shadwell … Patel got out at Shadwell to change for the little spur line to Tower Gateway, and stood there waiting for a few minutes.