I knew Paddington Basin, back in the days when nobody thought it had any value. There was a community of people living there in decaying canal boats. It was an aqueous private kingdom, within earshot of the screeching and hooting railway trains and the whoosh of cars on the elevated Westway, but somehow totally remote. A few steps along the towpath from all this, and you were into the upmarket cream-stuccoed enclave of Little Venice and Maida Vale. That sudden transition from one urban condition to another was absolutely London, like the way the fabulous wealth of the City of London financial district suddenly hits the poverty of the East End. Such contrasts are what defines the capital. Developers' Domestos washes all that away and creates homogeneity.

It's not all bad, of course. A few decades ago, and the first act of the developers would have been to fill in the canal, just as today they have done away with the railway sidings a few hundred yards west. Today, however, water is seen as an enriching ingredient, something that adds value. Up and down the country, derelict canal basins and arms are being dug out and restored. New stretches of canal are even being built, so as to increase property values. This brings another problem. Britain's waterway network, once a near-invisible leftover of Georgian industrial muscle, the backdoor to every important city, has become a linking device for an ever-increasing series of lookalike property speculations. People float from one business park-cum-housing estate to another. The biggest of which is Paddington.