We went to Brixton last night – it’s yet another thing about London that has improved vastly since the ‘80s

I haven’t graced Brixton with my presence for at least 30 years - just before the riots, probably. Back then, it was a dump. People talked rather desperately about its vibrancy and sense of community and exotic food and how – apart from the distinct likelihood of being mugged or caught up in street violence – it was all really rather jolly. It wasn’t. It was a dangerous, crime-ridden ghetto. All I wanted to do was get back to Bayswater with all my internal organs still functioning.

A niece of ours has bought a house with her partner a six-minute walk from the Brixton Tube Station, and we’d been summoned for dinner and a look around their new place. Standard London three bedroom terraced house, beautifully done up. That was no surprise, but Brixton was. Okay, we didn’t enter the borough’s hinterland, where I’m told some things haven’t changed, but the bit we saw – including the High Street – was busy and bustling and pleasant, with nary a hint of menace. There was some young fool distributing leaflets while shouting out slogans about fighting racism and colonialism (maybe he meant the anti-white racism routinely purveyed by the BBC/Guardian axis and the reverse colonialism represented by waves of immigrants taking over large swathes of English cities) – but there was no other sign of idiotic militancy. The crowds emerging from the tube at 7.45pm – and again around 11, when we were making our way home - mainly consisted of young white people. The roads we walked down were about three-quarters gentrified.

Brixtonians being vibrant 30 years' ago

Brixtonians being dull and well-behaved now

As we rode the Victoria line on the way back, surrounded by tourists, chatty twenty-somethings and a few exhausted workers, it struck me how safe the tube now feels compared to 30 years ago, when late-night trains always seemed to be full of ethnic gangs, drunks, football hooligans, beggars, buskers and creepy-looking weirdos. I presume a massive increase in the deployment and sophistication of surveillance technology has helped (but I'm told it doesn’t seem to have made buses any more pleasant). Whatever the reason, using the underground late at night no longer feels like playing Russian Roulette. There were even bouquets of fresh flowers liberally dotted around some of the District Line stations - what a lovely touch!

King's Cross Station

Apart from Brixton, many other areas of London have also improved out of all recognition. My wife took me on a tour of St Pancras and King's Cross  and the surrounding area a few weeks ago. I’m sure that many architecture experts will tell me the vast new development and what’s been done to the stations themselves is a betrayal of traditional London architecture – soul-less and show-offy - while socialists will be appalled that so many poor people, prostitutes, pimps, muggers and crack-fiends have been forced out of their traditional haunts. Me, I loved all of it – it’s just so civilised and pleasant and attractive. Who would ever have imagined that sipping a cappuccino in King's Cross Station could be a delightful experience? Or that one would be surrounded by people who didn't look like savages from some post-apocalyptic nightmare? Or that it would all be so clean? Or that having a sign for Platform 9 3/4 from Harry Potter would afford so many people so much pleasure? (The crowd around it was so large, we initially thought some pop star must have put in an appearance.)

As for the street-food stalls behind the station at the top of King’s Boulevard - they change every day on a rota system - well, I had a Basque roast pork “sandwich” which may just have been the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted: every stall appears to offer superb, cheap food with all the boring bits edited out. For those of us who grew up in an era characterised by Wimpey hamburgers and Lyons Corner Houses, London food is now a marvel.

St Pancras Station (and I never thought I'd ever have occasion to write these words) is simply wonderful - enormously impressive and welcoming. And, on the day we visited, entirely free of scuzzballs - proof that if you make genuine, sensitive efforts to improve the urban environment, design it intelligently, fill it with busy people, and then police it, it'll creep-out the creeps, and they'll move on. As someone pointed out recently, after St Pancras, Gare du Nord feels distinctly Third World.

We have friends in Hoxton, and that’s now surprisingly pleasant (and achingly trendy). Ditto Clerkenwell. Thanks to the Westfield Shopping Centre, even grotty old Shepherd’s Bush – whose Green used to be infested by a representative cross-section of the underclass – is approaching acceptability.

I know Roger Scruton would despise me for admitting this, but I love all the new buildings erected along the Thames during the past three decades. And while Canary Wharf isn’t my scene (too many nervous-looking financial types puffing cigarettes and holding tense pavement conversations on smartphones), there’s nothing much wrong with the look or feel of the place.

I haven’t been to Greenwich to see the Olympic Park. I was extremely sniffy about it while it was being built – but given how startlingly well other run-down chunks of London have been revived, I suspect even that’s okay.

And, for some odd reason, the sight of Boris bikes always cheers me up, as does the introduction of new buses that look a bit like our dear old Routemasters.

I realise other areas will have suffered due to an exflux from bourgeoisified parts of the capital – local news is full of stories of knifings, shootings, rapes, gang-fights and ethnic and religious tensions in depressing-sounding bits of London I’ve never heard of despite living here for 54 years. But as I don’t know anyone who lives in those places and have absolutely no intention of ever visiting them, I prefer to celebrate the enormously heartening improvements to those sections of this ridiculously huge, maddening, yet strangely lovable city I do visit.