In a similar vein, the medieval past of Norwich is layered. A tidbit of information that stuck with me during a tour of the historied Dragon Hall is that the people that once occupied this building—which has stood in the same place for more than five hundred years—once lived at a time when the street level was much lower.

Nobody really knows why the street level was lower more than half a millennium ago, only that as time passed, those who inherited Dragon Hall began to build upwards. That is, to build upon the remnants left behind by those that came before, through a process of sedimentation and slow accumulation.

In the dark of night, the dizzying steeple of the ancient cathedral glimmers in the Norwich skyline like a north star, a compass for the wanderers of its darkened streets. Churches yawning with histories rise from every corner—my personal favourites being the church of St Julian and St Peter Mancroft. These imposing presences are witnesses to the cathedral city’s twenty-first century residents and their more modern furnishings. What if these stones could speak?

As somebody who is, in many ways, hyper-sentimental, who struggles with the idea of an inaccessible then stretching away from now through the lengthy corridor that is time’s passage, the accretive tendency of time ought to bring comfort. Or so one might assume. One tries to grasp onto time but it slips like grains of sand through the spaces between fingers, until our grip eventually finds some tangible bedrock, the material evidence of that then.

But minds may just as well groan and snap under the weight of our collective histories.

As an imaginative exercise, I took a fistful of city that I was wandering through one morning and tried to push it through the recesses of the past. What changed? What has remained? What were the roads of sleek bitumen, before they were paved for automatons of rubber and steel, and what sounds once echoed off these walls of flint and stone?

And as an environmental activist, it’s also become an occupational hazard, of sorts, to think on the future as much as the past, of what people will think when they look back at us, when we become consigned to that inexorable then.

As the biosphere that we inhabit stumbles over its ecological tipping points, as the polar ice caps continue to melt, so too will the world that we know of today be unfamiliar to the world of the future.

There is the curious matter of Doggerland—the name given by geologists for the great stretch of land that once connected the United Kingdom and France, during the last ice age—when the planet was chillier, and when just a pinch more of the world’s ocean was locked up in polar ice, drawing sea levels down sufficiently that the British Isles were not quite isles, but perhaps a peninsula. That is, during a time in which early humans were first learning to plant, to sow, and to harvest. When those people ceased a wandering, nomadic lifestyle and began to root themselves within the land—accreting their lives over generations.

To live in space is also to live in time; these are not concepts that can be disentangled from one another.

The land that we have taken to be a static and immutable force has been shifting across scales incomprehensible to us. In time to come, we might mourn the losses that will be encountered as sea levels rise and the lowest-lying parts of the known world are lost—a category that hungrily enfolds both East Anglia and Singapore in its embrace.

But Doggerland is too steeped in the trench of our prehistory to be written into our collective memories, and so it is not mourned. It is strange to ponder, that somewhere, deep in our evolutionary lineage, were people not too different from us at all, who lived and breathed and knew the world as different from what it is today.

Is there comfort in that? In knowing that even with pieces of ourselves erased, we can continue to remake ourselves anew, through this tedious and altogether fundamental accretive force?

Norwich—the city, the place-time, the aggregation of unfolding lifespans—seems to already harbour within it the knowledge that there is.