London

We know them as Cornhill and Ludgate Hill, with the now buried Walbrook running between. Thus emerged London.

William Blake called the bricks of London “well-wrought affections” by which he meant that the turning of clay and chalk into the fabric of the streets was a civilising process which knit the city with its primeval past.

The Portland stone of the Customs House and St. Pancras Old Church has a diagonal bedding which reflects the currents of the ocean; there are ancient oyster shells within the texture of Mansion House and the British Museum. Seaweed can still be seen in the greyish marble of Waterloo Station, and the force of hurricanes may be detected in the “chatter-marked” stone of pedestrian subways. In the fabric of Waterloo Bridge, the bed of the Upper Jurassic Sea can also be observed.