Description: The life and times of a curious entomologist
This is the MI6 building at Albert Embankment, Vauxhall. When I worked for a medical publisher in nearby Bondway during the mid-1980s there was a bus-stop here from which I caught the number 36 routemaster back home to Peckham each evening. There was no ziggurat-style stone and green glass building then — just a chain link fence and an overgrown derelict site.
From the bus-stop you could look a good 10 metres down into a mass of bramble, buddleja, and wild flowers growing up from the bulldozed piles of crushed brick, broken rubble and twisted metal.
One warm summer evening as I peered through the wire, down into the deep wilderness I saw someone walking through the waist-high herbage with an insect net. I couldn’t imagine how they got in there, or what they were doing. I was too far away to hail them over the traffic noise and my bus arrived shortly after.