Perfidious Albion

Recently I went to visit people I once new, in a city I lived in for more than twenty years. I spent time walking through all the new building that had happened since I left a decade ago, and some that had already happened before I left. And it was not awful. But, also, it wasn't anything at all. It could have been similar developments in London ('more London', or most of Canary Wharf) or just anywhere really: identikit expensive-modern bland sameness, with no sense of place at all. The cit...