On reading London like a codebase: a slow walk through the Lea Valley

I spent a Saturday walking from Tottenham Hale to Stratford with a notebook, trying to read the city the way I’d read an unfamiliar repository.

Where are the load-bearing functions? Where’s the accidental complexity? Where can you tell someone got promoted halfway through implementation? A long, fond, occasionally grumpy field report from one of the strangest stretches of edge-of-town in the country.