The arches at the top of the Carmo Convent carry nothing. They spring, they curve, they meet at the crown, and then there’s sky. Everything they were built to hold came down on 1 November 1755, and nobody put it back. Look closely at the roofline and you’ll see scaffolding tucked between the bays, which is the detail that gives the game away: somebody is paying to keep this building broken.

Most heritage sites ask you to look at one moment. Wawel makes you look at four or five at once, and it does this on a single lawn, in about the space of a football pitch. Stand at the south-eastern end of the outer courtyard and the hill lays itself out like a diagram. In the middle distance, the cathedral: a green copper cap on the Sigismund Tower, a brick clock tower with the flag on it, and off to the right the gilded dome of the Sigismund Chapel, which has been catching whatever light Kraków can spare since the 1530s.

The chapel front is the part most people photograph without knowing what they are looking at. It sits at a corner off Rue Bellecordière, wedged between café awnings and a modern glass shopfront, and the inscription cut into the stone above the door reads LE GRAND HOSTEL DIEV. Old spelling, U carved as V in the Roman manner. Above the door there is a Pietà in relief, which is the dedication itself: Notre-Dame de Pitié.

On a November morning in 1981 the Queen Mother poured concrete into a column form on Lime Street. It was the sort of ceremony that earns a photograph and a paragraph in the trade press. It was also the start of the strangest office building in London, and the start of an argument that has still not been settled forty years after the underwriters moved in. Lloyd’s had run out of room.

I still don’t know which church this is. I walked past it, looked up, took the picture, and kept going, and by the time I thought to check I was three streets away and it had started to rain. There are a lot of these in Bilbao. Grey stone, gold trim round the windows, a spire that goes up further than it needs to, wedged in between an office block and a bank branch like nobody planned any of it.