Nothing But Green Lights

You don't drive an R34 through London in the daytime. Not because you can't, but because the city won't let it breathe: thirty years of traffic engineering aimed at exactly the thing you're sitting in. So you wait. You let the city finish with itself. The plan tonight is simple and it has one rule: keep moving. The night ends on Brick Lane, and not before it's been earned.

Ten o'clock, Ace Cafe. The North Circular hums somewhere behind the pumps and the car park is already half full of Japan: a pair of FDs, an EK9 with the lot, somebody's freshly-landed Chaser on temporary plates. Cooling fans cycle on and off down the rows; the whole place smells of petrol and fried onions, which is the smell of this exact culture and nowhere else. The Ace shuts at eleven. That's not a curfew, it's a starting gun.

Half past midnight and the A40 pours you in. This is the hour the night was named for: the city's signals run a night pattern, and if you hold a steady 28 through the phased sections they fall for you one after another, green after green after green, the whole of Westway strobing past the glasshouse skyline. The expansion joints thump through the chassis in tempo, the road telling you the beat. Nobody built this as an experience. It just happens, every night. For whoever shows up.

The Limehouse Link swallows you at two. A mile and a bit, £293 million of it, the most expensive stretch of road Britain ever built, and at this hour it belongs to you alone. The lighting is fluorescent and completely unsentimental; every surface throws it back at you, hard, twice. You turn the stereo off, because the tunnel is the sound system now. Drop a window. The RB26 comes on cam at four thousand and the walls play it back a half-beat late, the sound the modest little badge on the boot never mentions.

You take the long loop east because the night is going too fast now. Greenwich through the foot of the peninsula, the river doing its black-glass thing, and then the wait: first light lands at 04:41 and sunrise at 05:22 in mid-July, so there's time for the top deck, the open roof of a multi-storey that never closes, high enough to put the skyline where it belongs. Concrete still warm from yesterday. The car ticking as it cools. The city starts to hum again underneath you, and for about twenty minutes the light does the thing photographers pretend is a filter.

Brick Lane doesn't open at dawn because it never shut. Beigel Bake runs all night, every night, and at five in the morning the queue is cab drivers, nurses off shift, and you. Salt beef, mustard that means it, tea in a cup that has never heard of a saucer. Nobody looks twice at the car, which is the most London compliment there is. Drive it home gently; it earned that too.