My night climbing is not strictly legal. I slide under fences. I go slowly: My kind of expedition has nothing to do with the bravado of those roof climbers who hang from the edges of chimneys and joists. And I don’t have the kind of arm muscles that mean I can do pull-ups with one hand, so the building needs to have scaffolding. (The scaffolding, though, mustn’t reach all the way to the top, otherwise the roof will be covered in plastic; there will be no view and it will smell like dust and feet.) I am always a little scared. It is a grotesque whimsy to want to dance on top of a skyscraper.

I’ve never been caught, but have been told that if I ever am I should be honest but not garrulous. Say only that I wanted to see the city from above, to know what London was hiding. It is true, too, that my freedom from the fear of being caught stems in part from the privileges of my class and race — London is still uneven in those it allows to sin.

Not long ago I climbed newly erected scaffolding to the top of Centre Point, a 380-foot skyscraper in the center of the city. I started climbing buildings while in college, clambering up small spires and saluting Oxford’s gargoyles, but this was different. It wasn’t the first skyscraper I had been up, but it was the tallest, and at its feet is one of the busiest streets in London. Even at half-past one in the morning, Tottenham Court Road still has stragglers: drunkards, shift workers and occasional police officers.