My first impression is that it’s much smaller than I remember it and incredibly run-down. It wasn’t much when I lived here, but Christ! It wasn’t this bad. Big sheets of plywood are nailed across the windows of half the shops in the High Road, the wood almost hidden by tattered layers of fly-posted advertisements; shells of abandoned vehicles clutter-up the car park of what we used to call the ‘new flats’. Not much new about them now. Crude graffiti daubed on the concrete walls, grey washing slumped along improvised lines on the balconies and walkways, a few mean looking youths leaning on their motorcycles at the opening to the underpass, a stray cat rummaging for food around an overturned wheelie-bin by the line of plundered and doorless garages. I roll down my window and am assaulted by the smell of decay, and the acrid fumes left over from a recent bonfire.