A note from the poet Paul Farley suggesting a walk around London looking for interesting doorways seems like an invitation to the happier life. We meet at Patisserie Bliss near the Angel and set off down St John's Street, the old cattle path to Smithfield. The street winds downhill through typical London mess and beauty, at one point throwing up a perfect view of St Paul's, before instantly withdrawing it again.



First stop is the Priory Hotel under the archway of Hat and Mitre Court, surely the most ignominious doorway in London, where I once visited a psychotic Welsh tramp. "Permanent Guests Arranged For. Please Ring." Luckily, nobody answers.

We proceed to St John's Gatehouse, all that remains of the Priory of St John, an order founded in Jerusalem in the eleventh century. The room over the Gate was once occupied by the Gentleman's Magazine, founded in 1731, which published Johnson and Garrick.



(The TLS was next door when I wrote my first column in 1988.) By the nineteenth century the Gatehouse had become the Jerusalem Tavern, but when the Order was revived as an ambulance service the Tavern set off to various addresses in the area, most recently in Britton Street.



We pay a brief visit to John Betjeman's house in Cloth Fair, now a wine bar named after him, then pass through a gateway to St Bartholomew's churchyard, over which towers a narrow Elizabethan house whose half-timbered frame was discovered in 1915 when a Zeppelin dislodged plaster and tiles. The church was built by Henry I in 1123, in fulfilment of a vow made when lying ill. Over there is the hospital founded in the same year, where Robert Bridges worked as a house surgeon. We walk past a sign telling us not to enter the church because filming is going on -a not uncommon activity in the oldest, most atmospheric church in London (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Shakespeare in Love, The End of the Affair).



I seem to be taking over Paul's tour but he is patient as it begins to rain. I drag him next to Postman's Park, King Edward Street, once the churchyard of St Botolph's, the location of a set of memorials to humble acts of bravery involving things like runaway trains and sinking ships: "Mary Rogers, Stewardess of the Stella, self-sacrificed by giving up her life-belt and voluntarily going down with the Stella, March 30th 1899"; "Sharon Smith, pantomime artist at Princes Theatre, died of terrible injuries received when attempting in her inflammable dress to extinguish the flames which had enveloped her companion, Jan 24th 1863". The memorials were the inspiration of the painter and sculptor G. F. Watts, a disliker of the upper orders. His plaques are protected from the weather by a little lean-to roof where postmen from the old King Edward Street post office used to come and sit and open their greaseproof packages of sandwiches in their lunch hour.



There is a pre-1876 photograph of Wren's Temple Bar, taken when it still stood at the point where Fleet Street meets the Strand, dividing the cities of London and Westminster. That was the year it was dismantled for road widening, stored in a yard off Farringdon Road for ten years, then bought by the brewer Henry Meux, who reassembled it at his place in Herefordshire (rather like the Euston Arch, which lines a stream in the demolition contractor's garden to this day).

The Temple Bar remained in Herefordshire until three years ago when it was rebuilt once more in Paternoster Square, next to St Paul's Cathedral. I am keen to inspect this archway, which gave its name to a famous telephone exchange in my youth, but we find it parked in a corner of this sterile plaza and conclude that they should have left it where it was.



"I have a doorway", says Paul as we proceed via the Mitre Tavern in Ely Place (officially part of Cambridgeshire) down Chancery Lane into Southampton Buildings, where he used to work in the Patents Office. "They used to have a revolving door here", he remarks, without mentioning his poem on the subject.

It begins, "When I see some kids springing the gallery doors / I lament the great revolvers. As we enter / a new era of doors, I can remember / the thrill involved, the stately, dumb inertia . . .". The poem recalls how "whatever / effort we put in, the doors would answer . . . / we were time travellers / fast-forwarding ourselves into the future / before we were thrown out into an era / of never even having to lift a finger".



On up the Strand past the seedy Strand Continental ("Single Pounds 00.00.

Double Pounds 00.00. Vacancies") past the chrome-plated Savoy (suites from Pounds 1,000) into Carting Lane near where Bob Dylan was filmed throwing down cue-cards of words from "Subterranean Homesick Blues" at the start of Don't Look Back. We are here to see the last of the sewer ventilator lamps glowing greenly in the falling dusk, although whether it is running on excess gas from the sewers as it was originally designed to do is doubtful. Once upon a time all London was lit by these calm pale lights.



Down to Embankment Gardens to see the Watergate, marking where the Thames came to before 1862. The elaborate stone archway was built in 1626 as an embarcation point from the gardens of the Duke of Buckingham's York House and is all that was left standing when the house was demolished fifty years later. In the shadows of the trees you can imagine the shouts of boatmen jostling for position, the flashing of silks as the Duke and his entourage flounced their way on to decorative barges, accompanied perhaps by Dryden, who commemorated him in a poem.



It is getting late and Paul is due to read at Poetry International. He has one more site to show me. "The first thing I did when I came to London in 1985 was buy an A-Z and look up Heddon Street, where the sleeve of Ziggy Stardust was shot." We hunt out the peculiar cul-de-sac behind Regent Street, a dark industrial area in 1972, now a place of tourists and cafes. Tables are set out where a cat suited, guitar-slung Bowie once put his foot up on a packing case.

The lamp bracket still shines from the wall, but the lit sign saying K. West (Quest!) has gone. Round the corner is the telephone box in which he poses, hand on hip, for the album's back cover. "Ziggy is a cat from Japan" is the current graffiti.