[Contains swear words]

In the late 1980s, for reasons I will not go into right now, I drove with my father to a place near Queens Park, London NW6. I followed what had become a familiar route: up Wood Lane (W12), right at the Pavilion (a pub), past the North Pole (another pub) and on to Barlby Road. The North Pole is no longer a pub. It’s a Tesco supermarket these days.

As we approached Ladbroke Grove my father asked me to slow down. He told me that he had done a job nearby, a school building, in the early 1970s. He wanted to take a look at it. Hadn’t been up that way for years. I slowed down and was prepared to stop completely. He told me to carry on, at that speed. That was fine. In those days you could drive at 30mph on roads like that but I was going about half that speed. If there had been anyone immediately behind they would no doubt have beeped their horn. We drove past the place. The building had been pulled down, less than 20 years after he had been involved in building it. He swore and shook his head. “They pulled the fucking thing down.” He couldn’t believe it.

These days I get around London by public transport far more often than by car. In the spring I took a bus from Du Cane Road that followed the same route I had taken with my father: Wood Lane, North Pole, Barlby Road. I looked out for the spot where he had asked me to slow down. Not for the first time I wondered about other construction sites that he had worked on. Which buildings had survived, and which had lasted less than 20 years?

The two that came to mind immediately were two of the biggest projects he worked on: Charing Cross Hospital in the 1960s and the NatWest Tower (now known as Tower 42) in the 1970s. Both have survived and look likely to be around for a while yet. He reminded me, over the years, that I had been to the NatWest Tower when it was a building site, the odd Saturday when he took me and my brother into work with him. Maybe that was where I was given the task of knocking little bits of concrete (snots he called them) from the metal fixings on a partly built staircase. I was hammering away at them for an hour or two until a small piece of concrete ricocheted and bounced off my right eye. I feared permanent damage and cursed my stupidity, but there was no harm done. I continued at my task with rather more caution and didn’t mention my mishap to my father or my brother.

If he were still alive I would like to drive around London with him, checking out places he helped to build. As things turned out we only did it once, unplanned, in the late 1980s. And the building wasn’t there any more. As my father said, “They pulled the fucking thing down”.