This work is one of a number of site-specific installations that use objects presented as a collection to explore ideas of the continuity of history and the presence and desirability of the past. Using the visual language of the museum collection, taken to a point where only physical boundaries prevent it from continuing endlessly, the work also looks at how simple objects can become precious and desirable, and can carry with them something of the reality of the past.

Several strands have come together in the making of the work: the idea of the history of the site presented as a continuous narrative of identities, anecdotes, and records, interwoven with the experiences of people working here; the combined chronologies of a single day and the entire history of the site; the text deriving from a wide range of sources including Boswell's London Journal, Peter Ackroyd's London, eighteenth century tax assessments, censuses, seventeenth century political pamphlets, plea and memoranda rolls, records of citizen deaths during the Second World War, thirteenth century possessory assize records, parish registers, as well as information and comments provided by staff members; manufactured objects dating back more than two thousand years beside contemporary objects donated by staff members. The majority of the objects have been selected and arranged to create a chronological structure; rather than being arranged in archaeological strata they follow the linear pattern of the narrative.

Norwich Street first appears in maps in Faithorne and Hollar's maps in 1658; it was then called variously Magpie Yard, Magpie Alley, and Magpie Court, though in some parish records it is considered as just part of Fetter Lane. During the mediaeval period the area was developed from common land into small-holdings and market-gardens. It was a fairly prosperous residential and artisan area during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with several people dependent on the legal profession. The nineteenth century brought increasing density of population, with sudden changes between small areas of gentility and poverty. The 1871 census records 219 residents of Norwich Court. At the outbreak of the Second World War the street was still largely residential, but suffered badly in the Blitz; three members of one family living at No. 93 were killed in a shelter at the Monotype Corporation where Fetter Lane meets New Fetter Lane, and incendiary bombs destroyed practically everything between Shoe Lane and Furnival Street on the night of 29th December 1940.

As is often the case with London streets, one gets the impression of life's major events happening just around the corner. Several famous people lived or worked in neighbouring streets, and while we do not know whether Samuel Johnson, Titus Oates, Kier Hardie or Charles Dickens walked along Magpie Alley or Norwich Street, it seems improbable that they did not. Research into daily life brings out items of interest to balance the absence of great deeds: the mediaeval law of infangthief which allowed the instant punishment of thieves caught red-handed; John Stow's observations on the obsessive nature of football in 1598; the routine thickening of wine with lead in the eighteenth century; and the Victorian use of hedgehogs to deal with infestations of black beetle.

Julian Walker has made installations using large numbers of objects for the Natural History Museum, Arnold & Porter, the City of Nottingham, the World Health Organisation, Worcester and Hastings Museums, and other institutions; he has also worked with the British Museum, the Ikon Gallery and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. His installation for the New Contemporaries at the 99 Liverpool Biennial, based on the destroyed collection of Liverpool City Museum, was widely praised; his work has been exhibited widely in the UK, and in the US and Europe, and is represented in a number of public and private collections.