Everyone knows that one number of a postcode in London can change everything – from the designer boutiques of Chelsea (SW3) to the ska bars of Brixton Hill (SW2). Even more idiosyncratically, in this most deliberately mixed of cities, a move of a few hundred metres can take you to a different world.

My partner and I decided to swap a flat and a rented room in the leafy villa-lined roads of St John’s Wood (NW8) for a terraced house in a Victorian garden suburb in north Kensington (W10) – only just over a mile as the crow flies. We wanted more space: a little garden of our own and the security and control that come (in theory at least) from being a freehold owner. We knew we were moving to a more socially and ethnically mixed area. What we were not quite expecting was the sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle, ways in which our senses would need to adjust.