Walking last week from Stepney Green Tube station to Limehouse, I crossed at midnight the seven-acre churchyard of what has always felt to me like the spiritual centre of east London. St Dunstan’s is only a small, ragstone, 15th-century parish church, now amid rough tower blocks, gentrified terraces and city noise, but once a village church when Stepney was a village. Somehow its past clings to it, set in so large a burial ground, testament to the victims of the Great Plague. St Dunstan’s radiates a quietude that cathedrals lack, and it’s a wonderful thing that its custodians have insisted on keeping the churchyard open at all hours, its wide, stone-paved walks criss-crossing between the bustle all around.

At this hour, though, all was silent. Then I noticed a man walking his spaniel on a long lead. A fox had noticed the spaniel too, and the two canines edged gingerly towards each other, inspecting, sniffing, peeking around the monuments and gravestones. Across six centuries the rural past and the metropolitan future had caught each other’s scents. Two ghosts. Each backed off and went their separate ways.