Cocooning, drawing loved ones close, was the first reaction to murder and terror. Staying in and getting a takeaway and texting everyone as we huddled over the horror. Did you do that? I did, until somehow life asserted itself again in its defiance. It was like finding a pulse again. “We must all go to Paris,” I found myself thinking. It really is as beautiful as we want it to be. These people are as cool as they think they are and, of course, it wasn’t just me thinking this; a hashtag emerged – #JeSuisEnTerrace. And my heart leapt. #JeSuisEnTerrace. Smoking. They didn’t say smoking. They don’t need to.

Being outside eating, drinking, talking not of units and chia seeds but of life itself is where I want to be. In a city that stays out late and is full of alleyways and dark snugs, and people who tell you about what really matters. This is the fantasy of the city and if you come from a small town, as I did, you never lose it or want to.

That is the thing about Islamic State, or Daesh – please, this is their name – they want to destroy all the things that make great cities great. Difference lives in the big city. Deviance flourishes. Difficulty produces both edge and wonder. There is something so terribly suburban about the ambition of these murderers and mercenaries. Their mission to kill pleasure will always be thwarted by those who flock to London or Paris or Berlin to pursue it. Great cities are always impure, always impossible, and this is why everyone who wants to reinvent themselves goes to the biggest metropolis they can. To see and be seen. Self-creation is an energy. It is the very opposite of destruction.

And this, too, is why we must fight for our old dirty town in ways that are not just about “fighting terror”. Parts of London now are being systematically destroyed by property development. Am I equating property development with mass murder? No. But there is more than one way to kill certain ways of life. Gentrification is most often seen as a crisis of homelessness, of poverty, of pushing the undesirables out to the edge. It is that, of course. But it is also a concerted attempt to bring order to disordered places. It promises to replace danger with safety and that safety is always just another shopping mall. And flats. Retail cleansing.

This week I went to see Longing Lasts Longer, a show by Penny Arcade, the legendary New York performance artist. She spoke of many things, among them “gentrification of the mind”. As I was in Soho, it certainly resonated. What is left of Soho must be saved, but is it too late? If you don’t stand up for sleaze and gay bars and the old dives they will be themed up before you know it. This is not about nostalgia. It has happened.

Gentrification means the world is now one giant flat white. Or a private members’ club full of “creatives”. The freaks who used to trip around Soho and tell you in which particular basement you could find another necessary drink are an endangered species.

Still, though, London feasts on their legend as it flogs its wares, just as Paris still breathes the Gauloise kiss, the urban embrace. For here now is the conformity of the suburban soul that Ballard warned us would be the future if we did not understand it. The revenge of the suburban is an innate part of this gentrification. It’s done to make our lives safer and easier. Thus Crossrail can destroy Paolozzi murals and knock down major music venues. We destroy our own history in the name of development.

Now that a developer (Derwent London) has bought the buildings around Hanway Street, many are worried about what they will do to this small warren of bars and jukeboxes and late night haunts, where you could share a Special Brew with an artiste of some unknowable kind, where there would be girls half your age and men twice it and you could stagger out into the dawn wondering what had happened to your makeup.

Maybe you didn’t come to the city to find its hidden and dirty secrets – or your own. More fool you. Maybe you don’t mind that so much of it is being pimped, that cranes are everywhere while people sleep in doorways. Maybe Soho is just a state of mind and few people care anymore, and I should just take up gardening or knitting and get with the programme.

But I can’t, for everything I wanted to escape is closing in. This gentrification embodies a kind of puritanism that says nothing can be messy, dirty, undesigned. Because someone else owns it. This landgrab may not scare me as much as bombs, but scare me it does. What happened in Paris made me love Paris afresh, and then look at my own city anew. In truth, I won’t be En Terrace; it’s too cold. But to the left can you see that little black door? Knock on it and go up the stairs …