“And While London Burns” is an interactive operetta produced by the enviro-political art activists, Platform. http://andwhilelondonburns.com. It is presented as a journey through the City of London to a musical and theatrical accompaniment. The trouble is – the opera was produced in 2007 – and many Landmarks and wayfinders have now disappeared.

I have just been taken by the hand and led through the streets of London. It was a terrifying experience:  thrust into a world of global finance, fund management and oil. It appears the City is not merely the Corporation’s machine for making money, but a rapacious storm of glass and steel conjured up by investment bankers hell-bent on leading the entire godless fellowship to its own destruction by fire, water and ultimately dust. The rest of us will descend too, complicit in our apathy.

If the decadence of our financial age is dragging us to apocalypse then I expect something different from the architecture. Babel did not look this austere or tidy, so let’s build spiralling turrets in black ebony spewing fountains of virgin’s milk from gilded gargoyles. Grand halls lined with the lifeless naked effigies of our business rivals. And labyrinthine passageways, walls coated with fur and garish stone creeping down into underground caverns crammed with intoxication and libidinous debauchery. If we are all going to burn in a pit of self-indulgence and greed, then let’s do it properly. So where the fuck is that ‘pink marble stairway’? I can’t find it anywhere.