I yearn for dust and dereliction.

I used to walk along Riverside Road with my brother fairly regularly, when I was a child. There was a river (The Wensum), a road, railway sidings, and the fenced off open space that used to be Boulton & Paul steelworks. I remember mostly the dust in the summers, the tracks set into the road running up to the river's edge, and derelict warehouses and factories. Today I walked a short distance of where all that used to be.

Now, most of the old industrial buildings have been redeveloped, or replaced with modern housing. In so many ways this regeneration is better than what was before. But to me, it has no soul, it feels bleak. The scene above is one of the few remaining bits of character. The brick building at the end is the Waterfront, a music venue, where I spent much of my youth watching all manner of bands and maybe having the odd adventure.

Change is hard to cope with. I think it would probably be easier to cope with the entire area being unrecognisable, than it is to see the odd glimpse of the past floating to the surface. The city as a whole has had periods of major regeneration - the area behind the waterfront pictured was composed of small yards, slums which were demolished in the 1960's, and replaced with modern housing. Change is inevitable, but maybe it only means something if you remember where you started from.

I had five minutes spare at lunchtime to take this. Just behind me is the Novi Sad Friendship Bridge (Novi Sad in Serbia is twinned with Norwich) which opened in 2001. Always stuck in my mind because it was only two years before that NATO bombed the bridges in Novi Sad.