All of London’s seedy poetry is there to see in the setting for TV thriller Slow Horses | Tim Adams

There is no blue plaque on the wall of 126 Aldersgate, a narrow four-storey terrace above a fast-food grill, near London’s Barbican, but it can’t be too long before the building acquires some of the tourist cachet of 221B Baker Street.

The upper-floor offices are the fictional home to the rejected spies of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, led by the sulphurous Jackson Lamb. They are also the star turn – alongside Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas – in the unmissable Apple TV+ dramatisation, which returns for a fourth series this week. One of the many joys of the drama is that it offers a vision of London that rarely makes it on to screen – that everyday layering of centuries of history and grime and struggle that seeps through the pores of the present. Herron describes the “familiar medley” of those resolutely ungentrified streets perfectly, “the weathered and the new; the social housing estate, and the eye hospital… [and] the complicated facade of an office block straight from an SF comic”. The filming is a love letter to all that seedy poetry: “The gauzy reflections in puddles that… after-hours made fast-food outlets and minicab offices brief flashes of wonder.”

Herron chose the home of his “post-useful crew of misfits” well. Aldersgate, at the edge of the old city walls, marked the boundary, in Peter Ackroyd’s history, of “Cripplegate without”, medieval and Elizabethan home to “magicians and prostitutes and pickpockets and playwrights” and to the “stink industries” – tanneries and breweries and knacker’s yards. You can smell that indelible past in the fabric and furniture of Slow Horses. Traces of it might be detected, too, in the current ad for office space to rent at 126 Aldersgate Street – which makes no mention of the famous association – but which could be yours with “kitchenette, 2 wcs and good natural light” for £34.50 per square foot per annum.

Nature cure

There is a thoughtful interview with Kathy Willis, in the New Scientistabout her new book Good Nature. The former director of science at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, west London, and current professor of biodiversity at Oxford has examined the growing body of research that proves what we instinctively know: that being surrounded by “natural” sights, sounds and smells causes our heart rate and stress hormones to fall and our brain activity to become clearer. Even 20 minutes a day in the park has profound effects, not least in the way it brings us in touch with “the bacteria in the atmosphere around us”, with measurable improvement in skin and gut health. The perfect view, in this regard, Willis suggests “is an open one with a few scattered trees”. Observing and smelling and hearing such a scene – Wordsworth wasn’t wrong – gives you a “mental mini-break” since we are calmed by “landscapes with mid-fractal complexity”.

Fortune cookies

As you do, I found myself pondering in the sleepless early hours the story of a light aircraft that crashed on to the busy A419 in Gloucestershire on Wednesday. No one was badly hurt, but one of the two pilots seemed a little affronted to be repeatedly assured of his enormous good luck. On the contrary, he insisted, he was, in fact, very unlucky to have crashed on the road in the first place. The exchange brought to mind something that Cormac McCarthy, a connoisseur of human fate and fortune, once observed, often a useful thought whenever things seem to be nosediving: “You never know,” the novelist wrote, helpfully, “what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”