Paul Chester

Amazing description of London in the context of Geological time: (Underneath Saturday night, underneath the fried-chicken shops and the billboards and the railway arches, the geology of the city persists on its own timetable, scarcely scratched by the crackle-glaze of brick and tarmac spread over the top. Bexford, Lewisham, Woolwich: permanent-sounding names for gravel beds left behind by the river’s random swinging this way and that across a basin of clay between hills, for millions of years during which there were no names, no city, no humans. Here there was ice, pine forest, rainforest, tundra, ice again; over and over, and only in the very last iteration of the cycle, the faint grey thread of smoke rising from the first campfire, the first pinpoint of red in the London night. The city, the great city, is shallow lithography on the clay. The city is a mayfly veil.)