Somewhere in the vague, brown-coloured slums to the north and east of what had once been Saint Pancras Station. A cobbled street of little two-story houses with battered doorways which give straight on the pavement and which are somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.

There are puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branch off on either side, people swarm in astonishing numbers -- girls in full bloom, with crudely lipsticked mouths, and youths who chased the girls, and swollen waddling women who show you what the girls will be like in ten years' time, and old bent creatures shuffling along on splayed feet, and ragged barefooted children who play in the puddles . . .

Perhaps a quarter of the windows in the street are broken and boarded up.