All these Londons are to be found in Peter Brown’s current exhibition, in which – suitably for London and its worldwide reputation – wet and wintery weather predominates. Brown is, I have to say, a master of the pavement glistening with recent rain, of drops blowing across an alley, also of the kind of huge, impeding puddle that collects at the edge of a roadway or even across a pavement. Such a watery surface transforms an otherwise banal view, turning a streetscape back into something with links to nature and to a past when this same street was a country pathway between elms…so I enjoy particularly his Old Vic, Lockdown. The theatre in the background to the all-foreground puddle looks modest, which in fact it usually does, even when properly open to audiences. And even more I like Waterloo Road, with the great slanting blue rail bridge dominating the scene, as it does in reality, but here competing with the roadway beneath, has the air of having been turned into a canal.

But snow suits Brown even more than rain, which is why one of my absolute favourites in this show is Snow Flurry, The Ritz, Locked Down . . . It captures, as do many of these pictures, the weird quietness that repeated waves of Covid fear have imposed on the normally clamorous and crowded West End. But it has a timelessness that transcends this particular historic context: the two separate glum male figures, sheltering upright under the arches of the Ritz hotel are so near and yet so far from the small, busy figure of the man in brighter light exercising his dog. The snow that is just beginning is, even as it falls, turning to mush, which gives the whole scene an eerie, not-quite-of-the-present-day air. Snow tends to do this anyway, when it has settled properly, disguising modernity, giving streets once again the aspect of rural lanes. Falling Snow, Regents Park Road achieves this feeling splendidly, as too does Well Walk, Snow,