Across the street sits Spitalfields, one of London's oldest markets; it has transitioned into a hipster hot spot that attracts weekend crowds who are in search of fashionable creations by young designers. Opposite the market is Ten Bells, a pub famous for a patron who staggered out and into the hands of Jack the Ripper. Most nights, East End residents watch gaggles of tourists being led by theatrical tour guides who dispense history, theory, and lore. (Occasionally, residents treat the huddled visitors to their own reenactments of Ripper crimes; these are done in jest from second-story windows.) At the center resides Christ Church, a Nicholas Hawksmoor-designed building that was completed in 1729 and commissioned to serve as a formidable representative of the Church of England in an area once teeming with Protestant Huguenots who had fled Catholic France because of persecution. Tall and blockish, with an imposing porch and steeple, the church appears otherworldly and at odds with its surroundings.

"Lots of neomystics, visionaries, and psychogeographers - most famously Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair - have written about the Hawksmoor church," Sandhu says, as we begin our walk at the foot of the church's steps after the sun sets. "It looked beyond Christian, as if it had been winched to the East End from a far-off planet." Taking quick steps, Sandhu talks about the hoboes who used to camp on the church grounds and build roaring fires in the winter, and then he points to the sky and speaks about other landmarks that vie for skyline space and proffer a collection of competing­ imagery - Islamic minarets, brew-house chimneys, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the Erotic Gherkin, Londoners' nickname for the pickle-shaped building by architect Lord Norman Foster.