Whatever happened to the London night? This is is the question that Sukhdev Sandhu asks in his new project, the first part of which is now available on the web. The point of this “midnight traipse across the metropolis” is partly to protest against the morphing of “the London night” into something called “London nightlife” ruled by real-estate moguls, foreign investors, film directors, etc. But it also partly to restore to the city and to night-time a sense of the street, crime, poetry and grime.

For those who have read and enjoyed Sandhu’s London Calling the new project promises pleasures that one can be sure only this writer knows how to handle: a trudge through miles of sewers under the city; nocturnal travels in military helicopters with night-vision cameras; hours in the night spent with the nuns of Tyburn who pray for the souls of Londoners; midnights with the marine patrol on the Thames as they fish for corpses; jamming with East London DJs in towerblocks infested by the police. At one point in London Calling Sandhu had this to say about the writings of V.S. Naipaul: “Naipaul’s prose, so often praised by writers and critics, is crucial to understanding how narrow is his vision of London. He eschews embellished sentences, seeing in them evidence of mendacity and obfuscation. He prefers his sentences scalped and peeled. They are shorn of excess, of anything that might be considered ‘fine writing.’ As a result each page resembles a barren landscape, an emotional tundra. His paragraphs, weighted and measured, never arc or spin or fizz out of control. They are as heavy as breeze blocks–and about as aesthetically pleasing. They do not generate new rhythms. Nor do they experiment with syntax, just as none of his characters dares to embrace the sprawl and chaos of the city, but step back prudishly, sipping without gulping. In his books London is sapped of its vitality. His writing, then, may be graceful, but is metropolitan rather than urban. It lacks the vulgarity, the quickstep neologisms, the amped-up figetiness of the best London literature.” I had read lots of criticism of Naipaul before, but none that had been advanced on behalf of the street. There was no breast-beating about civilization; only a love-letter addressed to the city. This difference will now only grow. Because for Sandhu, it is a good thing that any place is an area of darkness.