I remember it from the mid-70s onwards. I don't feel it's drastically different. It feels cleaner, smarter, more crowded, safer, more user-friendly, and a lot less sketchy. I rather miss the sketchy old days. Sometimes, I like to travel to a totally different part of the city and see what it's like, and everywhere just feels the same as everywhere else now: bland, generic and expensive.

I do like knowing how long I have to wait for a bus or a Tube. I don't miss standing at a freezing bus stop for what felt like 45 minutes of frustrating uncertainty.

I miss greasy caffs. I'm grateful for good coffee everywhere, but I miss old Formica-tabled brown-windowed cafes run by orcs, selling toast so heavily buttered it could stop your heart. They used to be everywhere.

I miss old-school buses with an open back so you could jump on and off. (I know a few routes still have them, but not enough.) I miss the days of tubes without recorded messages and screeching electronic noises every time a door opens. I miss what used to be the Overground, when it was the North London Link, with old-school compartment carriages, the kind with two long seats that smelled like dust and ashtrays, closed off from the corridor by little wooden sliding doors.

I miss Kensington Market and Neal Street East. I miss all sorts of unique shops and markets that have been taken over by utterly generic high-street brands. I miss feeling out of my depth, out of my comfort zone; I miss visiting dodgy places that made you look over your shoulder. Notting Hill used to be shady as fuck: we went to All Saints Road to score, and you pressed the doorbell and stood well back as a boot flew out the window with a key in it because everyone was always too stoned to let you in. It was run-down as hell. Houses cost seven figures there now. Houses seem to cost seven figures absolutely everywhere.