JG Ballard sheds light on Wharf's "inhuman corners"

He imagined a place like this, too, a managed paradise of concrete and glass built to tower over the sprawling, anti-modern neighbourhoods of the city.

When he wrote High Rise in 1975, the skyscraper living he described, with all the rough edges taken off and all the rough elements taken out, was not so much a vision for the future as his logical conclusion of the present.

Of course, the riverside development (this time in Chelsea) inevitably descends into atavistic violence. But then, it's tempting to say, everything always did with him.

There was always, just about, a central character called Jim whose outward normality was only possible because of inner perversion.

Or who lived in a world so normal the only response is perversion. Or who was so perverse that he got brilliant at pretending to be normal.

There was often a sinister organiser of things, generally a scientist. And some revolution or coup or bloody climax. Or an attempt to have sex with car crashes.

And there's always an empty swimming pool.

It was intoxicating and brilliant. I know, what do I know? Whatever, I liked it.

There is so much to admire about him: He delivered his three children himself. He revelled in the blank anonymity of the M25 Surrey suburbs (something I spent my formative years doing). And he was a man for whom there were no simple answers.

He didn't hate modernity and the concrete worlds he described, but was rather deeply ambivalent to it all.

It's the same as anyone who works here feeling, as many of us do, two ways.

Firstly, that it would be great to work in Soho or live in the country or not be here. But secondly that there's something strangely fascinating about the Wharf and its CCTV and its inhuman corners, like where you can set off that little secret gate just by walking to it.

For anyone who grew up in the litter-strewn '80s, this is a place stolen from the future.

Anyway, that's why I missed my stop last night, engrossed in his obit. And how I ended up wandering lost in the Ballardian northern suburbs, with their square housing and lack of pedestrians.

As a colleague said, there's another one gone.

Dan Bourke also goes on a bit at mirror.co.uk/dan-bourke