Streetlights cast pools of shimmering light on the rain slick pavements.  Windows glow with the warmth of home, others remain silently darkened.  Ambitiously angular towers soar above tightly packed terrace streets, before increasingly morphing into glass and steel blocks that reek of investment yields.

This is not just a journey through the night.  It is a journey through a city’s history.  From the post-war determination to build a city for the public good, to the decline of the 1970s fostered by paternalistic neglect, and then the wholesale disposal of public land for private gain that has swamped London since the 1980s.  A city now designed for rentier profits, rather than its people.

Our guides for this nocturnal tour are London Clay, a duo comprising Hygiene drummer Pat Daintith on electronics and Gema Oliver on vocals, on their debut full-length, Private View.  The atmosphere is an ever shifting one – claustrophobic yet expansive, immersive yet resolutely allusive.  It sweeps from the throbbing dark wave of Desire Lines to the languorously shimmering, Jesu-like shoegaze of Apricity, and then from the deceptively hypnotic Smashing Time to the crisply percussive Straphangar with dextrous ease.

Drawing on the writings on London of Maureen Duffy, Olaf Stapledon, and Patrick Hamilton, the vocals deliver a spectral narrative.  For the most part, they are hauntingly ethereal presence, before the unsettling lullaby of Faraday and the uneasy murmurings of The Midnight Bell startle you from your reverie.  What ultimately emerges is a defiant ode to the resilience of a city.  Much has been squandered, but all is not yet lost, a sense of optimism reflected amid the skeletal piano and melodic drone of the closer, Clifton Rise.