That's not rain staining the building, it's memory leaking. Each failed business leaves its ghost - you can trace them in the old fixing holes, the darker squares where signs once lived, the stubborn remnants of vinyl lettering that won't quite peel away. Layer upon layer of commercial hope gone sour.

The building lines hold their nerve - all that Victoriana up top still believing in empire and industry - while at street level, everything dissolves into a soup of desperate retail. Even the pigeons look like they're on zero-hour contracts, pecking at prosperity's crumbs.

This isn't just change - it's endless changing. A street caught in an infinite update cycle, each new version less stable than the last. You can feel it: that vertigo of watching solid things turn liquid.

A young family passes by, the children's faces momentarily lifting the street's gloom. But they're heading elsewhere, like everyone else. This is capitalism eating itself in real time, each new venture feeding on the corpse of the last.

This is the street that refuses to die but can't quite remember how to live. It exists in perpetual transition, each "Opening Soon" sign a desperate prayer to the gods of footfall. The buildings above watch with disapproval as their ground floors mutate beneath them - another betting shop, another temporarily permanent pop-up, another surrender to the tyranny of the immediate.

Every few yards, another door to another future. But the future never arrives - it just circles the block, checking its phone, looking for somewhere else to be.