Free The Ambassador by Edwina Currie

occasions to travel in style, sir, but you should see how ordinary Europeans live.’
    The two began to stroll towards Highgate tube entrance. The embassy had had to be moved, like every other important edifice in London (with the exception of the royal palaces) as the waters rose, to higher ground beyond Regent’s Park, near Hampstead Heath. The Thames barrage had been dismantled, once it could no longer cope with neap tides; that was around the year 2050, two decades beyond its expected lifespan. From then on, the risks of remaining in central London for those with a choice were simply too great.
    The Northern tube line, the deepest, was abandoned without regret. Other sections of the underground railway liable to flooding were strengthened and pumps installed. A huge suspension bridge from Holborn Circus to Bermondsey, the Blair Memorial, opened on the centenary of the birth of the former European President. Otherwise, the cellars of Dickens’s London were left to night-dwellers and shadowy unfortunates.
    In effect the capital had become two cities separated by a river a kilometre wide at Greenwich. The political and business communities had shifted in toto fifteen kilometres north, using Union grants to take their façades with them. The produce markets had been relocated sub-surface and were linked to docks and freight terminals by sterile conveyor. The opportunity had also been taken to abolish the Zoo. But while a time traveller would have recognised many familiar landmarks, he might have been disorientated by strange juxtapositions: the Bank of England faced Big Ben, Covent Garden nestled around Nelson’s column, and Westminster Abbey had been turned on its axis at the suggestion of the owners of Harrods – who had made a mighty contribution to the expense – to give their shoppers next door a better view.
    Strether was struck by how clean the streets were. Hologram hoardings were neat, their messages witty and vivid. Verges were tidy, drains free of detritus. Street signs and lamps in blue and gold, the Union colours, were elegantly designed, with not a broken fixture in sight. He was still disturbed by the tiny cameras slung from every other post and puzzled, not for the first time, about what they might be looking for.
    But it was impossible to feel down at heart. Trees at every five paces had primroses and hyacinths flourishing at their base – untouched by any vandalism, he noted with pleasure. He had expected the original London plane trees, whose peeling bark could survive in smoke, but was delighted at the more exotic varieties relishing the cleaner atmosphere, with glorious aromatic foliage in red and yellow. They were also value for money. It was cheaper to perfume the air by natural means than the old way via gratings at street corners. And more reliable, since operatives were forever forgetting to replace the empty capsules; and, during the interregnum, terrorists had filled every capsule in Milan, Luxembourg, London and other Union cities with artificial skunk smell, which put thousands in hospital. A safer alternative had been sought, and the gratings sealed.
    London had once had a reputation as a dirty city. It had ranked with Naples, Marseilles or Moscow as a place of broken pavements, boarded-up shops, beggars with aggressive dogs, battered car lots masquerading as car parks, foul public conveniences, endless graffiti, red-light areas where wan-faced child prostitutes hovered, overflowing rubbish bins, smashed syringes, dead cats, live rats and a slatternly population that did not care or notice. ‘Inner city’ had then meant crime and squalor, especially at night, rather than entertainment, the avant-garde, glamour. The law-abiding moved out, the poorest were worst hit. Similar problems had afflicted American cities, such as New York and Chicago. Stretherliked historical novels and had recently finished a bloodcurdling effort entitled Bonfire of the Vanities set in a gruesomely unrecognisable