I hadn’t expected to be impressed when I arrived in a drizzle at a dingy youth club above a shabby public library, located across from a launderette on a bleak and windy housing estate in the South London district of Southwark.

Just before I entered, a couple of middle-age drunks fumblingly helped each other to pitch and roll into the nearby Canterbury Arms pub. As I was in Southwark, the words I had learned by rote as a schoolboy from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale” surprisingly resurfaced: