Of these, St Pancras Road, snaking between the two stations, is least clear about where it is going. Or you are diverted to the east, pass by the gasometers, and head along Goods Way, into railway land. The old is made clean.
Developers pounce on grime, rust and broken glass like cats on a rustle in the grass.
Yet here, along St Pancras Road, in a pause between dereliction and transformation, the monuments of past ambition can be seen as Piranesi saw old Rome. He showed temples infested with houses as those houses might be with wasps' nests, beggars and mountebanks lounging in the shadow of fallen stones, vegetation blurring and breaking ancient entablatures. A shop will sell and cut a sheet of glass to any shape you like. A second-hand furniture store has chairs of a kind you cannot remember having ever seen new. You can buy fish and chips.