Middle class

To the Geffrye Museum on Sunday. Have you been there? It's rather wonderful. Improbably set in beautiful 18th century almshouses in Hoxton, it records changes in interior design over the last half millennium; tracking the growth of London's middle class. Visitors start in the 17th century at one end of the building, and walk through a series of rooms representing a typical domestic scene of that period. In each case, we witness a moment in time for a typical Londoner. Two doors down from a Victorian lady reading a fashion magazine are a couple of Georgians interrupted playing cards. It is a magical insight into the forgotten lives of our recent ancestors: these are the people that did not make the history books, but whose lives seemed as important to them as yours does to you.

The Geffrye visit was impromptu - the plan on Sunday had been to go out for a Turkish lunch in Dalston and we jumped on the Overground for a couple of stops on a whim. The meal was splendid, in an area of London experiencing rapid change. One of many East End neighbourhoods to have been shaped by successive waves of immigration, the recent Polish arrivals share shopfronts with the Vietnamese, Turkish and Caribbean settlers that came before them. Today, however, the terraces of Dalston are returning to their roots, as middle-class graduates move in, raising house prices (and the standard of cupcake in the newly-opened fashionable cafes) and changing the purpose of an area that has assimilated migrants since days of the Empress of India.

After Geffrye, we returned to the Overground for the one stop jump to Shoreditch and coffee in the Boxpark. The Boxpark is one of those things that could only work in Shoreditch. A "pop-up mall" formed of disused shipping containers, it is populated by beautiful hipsters in their obsessively individual uniformity. I am so glad there are people willing to spend so much time and effort on how they look, despite so much of the aim being to look like they didn't really try at all. Silk screened coats, canvas shoes, vintage hats and metrosexual macs jostle in the sunshine by a railway bridge in an area once deprived, but now as affluent as it when it was first developed three hundred years ago.

In a few decades, the curators of the Geffrye will have to decide who to make their typical Londoner of the 2010s. They will have to settle on a single moment in time to represent you, me, the Turkish waitress who served our lunch, the chirpy oh-so-cool guys who gave us coffee and the people of (probably) a hundred nations that we unknowingly overlapped with in a single afternoon. How wonderful to live in a city that sets such challenges.