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Half of Raydon Street in Archway, north London, had been deemed unacceptable by Camden Council. The part where the street met Dartmouth Park Hill was declared no longer fit for purpose, in their eyes. It had become mottled and grey. Riddled with potholes. The white dashes that indicated the designated parking spaces were now barely visible. 'It's too much,' the Council cried with their collective voice. 'Something must be done.' Men were dispatched with cans of spray paint to tag strategic parts of the pavement with officially-sanctioned graffiti.

And so early one Monday in mid-November 2011, the workmen arrived. Cars were forcibly removed – picked up and placed on the back of trucks to be ferried away to, where? The workforce took up positions around the pre-painted marks. Then they began hacking and drilling, at 8am, to make the destruction of this already crippled road complete. It took them all day to chip away at the tarmac surface until by the end all that was left was a soft brown gravel that appeared to ooze in the bright winter sun like an exposed wound. The scab had been torn off and a new dressing would be applied at some later date.

The next day they returned, in their fluorescent yellow jackets that covered their fluorescent orange overalls and in their hard hats that protected them from any vengeful chunks of road that might fall from the sky (as a result, perhaps, of any residents watching from their balconies that felt resentful at this forceful rejuvenation of their beloved old street that they had come to know and love), and they set about it with giant machines. Heavy rollers that crushed and smoothed the lumps of tar that had been strewn across the street just previously by weird-shaped lorries, with funnels and sieves that spat out the virgin surface as they edged along at an impossibly slow pace. The men waved their hands in coded gestures and barked incoherent orders at each other and at the drivers who sat behind the wheels of these land-altering behemoths. For hours they crept up the street, filling the air with a rumbling cacophony of bangs and scrapes and the slow, crushing sound of alteration.

By 5pm the street had been transformed into a slick black river. It shimmered and shined in the evening winter haze. It looked impossibly smooth from where I stood on my balcony three floors up, looking down on it. I went down to have a closer inspection. I knelt down on the pavement and placed one hand against it, on its flank. I could feel the whole street heave underneath me, like a felled mammoth breathing its final deep breaths, not panicked but in a state of calm acceptance. I felt its last breath leave it and then it was still. Now the road shined but no longer shimmered.

The men came back on the third day to finish the task. New machines were brought in to tattoo the black body with marks and strips that would make it intelligible and navigable by drivers and pedestrians – the users of this road for whom it had been built and who would share it in conflict, as they had done before. Down... Up. Down... Up. So went the contraption, that looked so basic compared to the monoliths that had torn up and reconstructed the road itself, that laid down the white paint that marked out the bays in which the cars, when they returned, would park. There was no need for a central dash, for Raydon street was, and still is, a one-way street. Continuous double stripes of yellow near the T-junction with Dartmouth Park Hill to mark the areas where on no account was any car to park, for reasons of safety and convenience. As before, the workmen went about their task in a slow and considered fashion, fully aware of the significance implicit in each brush stroke, of the importance in making sure that the language they had been told to communicate between the council and the public about how the street was to be used in future would be impossible to misinterpret.

When they had finished they looked down and saw, as I did, that they had created a thing of beauty. A brilliant new street, crystallised in this one moment in a unique manner. For though it was wholly fresh and new, it had not been put to the task for which it had been created. And in that first moment when wheels drove over it, it would be sullied beyond repair, and yet be fulfilling its purpose. The residents whose cars had been towed complained to the council. Their case is still ongoing.