The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31—the only one that went to the World’s End and passed through some of the most varied and vibrant parts of the city. Starting in Camden High Street outside the World’s End pub, it headed up past Camden Lock to the old railway marshaling yards and the Roundhouse that had just become a cool music venue and then on round the strangely kitsch Swiss Cottage. It swung south down the hill past Abbey Road to cross the Kilburn High Road and on through Notting Hill Gate.

Pausing for the lights at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, you could peer out at the lovely reliefs of 1930s airplanes and steam engines carved on to the facade of Barkers in High Street Kensington before you turned west past the neo-gothic charm of St Mary Abbots and south again through avenues of peeling bedsits in Earls Court towards the wrong end of the King’s Road in Chelsea. There the conductor would shout, “All change,” because it had not just reached the end of the line but also another World’s End pub in the King’s Road. A quick stop for a cuppa in the transport café and then back north again, day after day, from World’s End to World’s End.

The approved method for catching the bus was to jump on when it was still moving by grabbing the white pole and swinging in, earning both the respect of your school friends and a furious tirade from the conductor. I would run upstairs into the smoky gloom of the top deck and try to get the front seats, where, if you opened the top windows with the little steel handle, most of the cigarette smoke would get blown to the back and you could sit with fresh London air streaming in. Eventually the conductor would work his way through the passengers, glaring at me accusingly as I ordered a half fare to Westbourne Grove with wide-eyed innocence. He would vigorously turn the knobs and handles on the intriguing steel ticket machine and out would come a faint strip of paper ticket, with its numbers and symbols printed in purple ink. Clutching this in my grubby hand, I would lean forward and enjoy one of the best views in London.

I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place.

It was the late 1960s, and London was still pretty patchy. It was more than 20 years since the end of the war, but there were plenty of areas that had not recovered from the Blitz. Neighborhoods like St. John’s Wood and Belsize Park were clean and prosperous, but then a few hundred yards down the road there was Kilburn. Damp houses with moldy plaster and broken windows lined streets between terrifying schools with grimy kids gazing forlornly through lethal wire fencing around the playgrounds. At the time, it was a downtrodden area favored by Irish immigrants, and it was little more than a slum. I used to look fearfully through the first-floor windows of the houses from my vantage point on the top deck into bare rooms with peeling wallpaper, cold and unfurnished, sad and empty. Then the bus would cross the Grand Union Canal, and we would head south along lovely streets with terraced houses, each with a well-kept little garden in front of it as we moved through the growing prosperity of Notting Hill and Kensington.

The contrast baffled and saddened me. It seemed so wrong that one could travel through such extremes—from poverty to wealth, from pain to comfort—all on a single smudged ticket. The abandoned and decaying buildings in Kilburn were no different from the houses in Camden or Notting Hill; it was just that they needed to be repaired, restored, cleaned up and loved, after which they would be every bit as beautiful and comfortable as the house that we lived in. There was clearly a link between beauty and well-being, but the developers and planners had other ideas. Before long they knocked down huge swathes of the Victorian houses so they could modernize the area, transforming the streets into their vision of an urban utopia, with brutalist high-rise blocks and car parks, with metal swings and slides for the children.

I looked at all this from the top deck and instinctively knew that something was wrong. Why would anyone want to destroy lovely old houses, the same houses that made Kensington so desirable, and replace them with buildings that resembled a pile of washing machines 30 floors high? How could this be right? I was not to know then but this passion for caring for beauty, and what was later to be defined as heritage, was to carry me to the ends of the world, far beyond the polar limits of Chelsea and Camden Town.

In my early teens I was taught to carve stone and wood by an eccentric genius called Don Potter. He was an artist and master craftsman who not only made great sculptures but also restored the old barn in which he and his family lived, fashioning the furniture and making all the plates and pots in his kitchen while his wife Mary wove the carpets and made the curtains. He was a hard taskmaster, like all good craftsmen, and frequently physically kicked boys out of the workshop for shoddy work or just being annoying. I was 13 when he taught me to cut stone for the first time, to struggle with the material and to fight the despair of breaking a piece off by mistake. He taught us that to make a good sculpture we just had to remove everything that was not required.