Unreal city - Michael Smith

Strolling through this wide sweep, gazing across the fleet of trains
bound for Paris or Brussels, the powder blue steel vaulting soaring
above them, the inside of a giant whale's ribcage, a hymn to the
infrastructure of our hyper-connected age; like Jonah swallowed up by it
all, by the hum of the giant extractor fans, the deep hum at the heart
of it all - back here, home again, lost in London...

With a property portfolio consisting of a beach hut in Kent, and a career as evanescent as it is unprofitable, the narrator of Unreal City
is a flaneur fallen on hard times, a creative bewildered by the slick
speed of the digital age, watching as the sculptors and painters and bon
viveurs begin to slip away and the advertising hipsters take over old
stomping grounds.

From the nights in old Soho, where an anonymous
green door was the gateway to a decadently dingy paradise, to the days
amid the shabby post-industrial elegance of Hackney's canalside
warehouses, this is a nostalgic love song to the drifters, the
artists, the glamorous misfits, the degenerate waifs and the
barmaid-enchantresses of the capital's backstreets and shadowy corners.