Before I visit a UK region or a foreign country, nothing annoys me more than a telephone call from a press officer or letting agent who, having read Property Week’s forthcoming features list, asks: ‘You know you have this feature coming up about Swindon/Cardiff/Stoke-on-Trent: are you actually going there?’
‘Of course,’ I answer brightly, stifling the urge to ask: ‘Is everything I write so flat that it reads like something plagiarised from the internet or the local newspapers?’
There is never any substitute for being there.
I won’t accept retail agents’ reassurance that a shopping centre is trading fabulously, until I have visited it myself to make sure that it is not a case of shuttered units, three charity shops and a kiosk selling dried flowers.
In Moscow, there is definitely no substitute for being there.
No one is certain what is going on.
You ask about a building site where work has stopped, and a knowledgeable office agent will say that maybe the contractors really are waiting for the cladding to arrive, or equally the developer may have run out of money.  
It is safer to write nothing.
But one development I could not miss was White Gardens, because AIG/Lincoln was on site with the office development below my bedroom window at the Holiday Inn. 
When I say on site, I mean that workers revved up their drilling and digging equipment at 6am and reluctantly turned off the last switch at 10 pm. 
The squeak squeak squeak to warn of an on-coming truck and the thud thud thud of driving down piles was continuous. 
If I had been in Moscow for any reason other than to look at property development, I might have asked the Holiday Inn manager for a quieter room.  
Instead I was mesmerised. 
In the space of a week, I witnessed the beginning of a steel superstructure.
It was a piece of good luck, because my requests to visit building sites were refused. 
In fact, walking off piste is a risk in Moscow.
Having paid by 300 roubles to visit the walled enclave of the Kremlin, guards blew whistles at me whenever I strayed from the pedestrian crossings in to the empty car-free grounds.
I left.
Outside the walls, I observed a mounted policeman and a mounted policewoman on ceremonial duty. 
The horses stood to attention while their riders flirted. 
He smoked a cigar. 
She smoked a cigarette.
If they can smoke on duty, why can’t a tourist wander freely?
There is no substitute for being there – even if it doesn’t give you any answers.

I had a dawn bus tour of Swansea on 23 October.

It was too cloudy for a blinding sunlight to rise from the bay.

But Swansea at dawn stands up to comparison with any other UK city.

The bus collected me from the Dragon Hotel, whipped down to the Marriott at the Maritime Quarter and finally to Morgans Hotel, the conversion of the old port authority building.

The five-star hotel was the venue for christening parties by Swansea ex-pat Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I wanted to peer in to see the clever conversion.

Unfortunately, by the time we reached Morgans, the bus driver hardly bothered to stop.

His brief was to wait for five minutes at Swansea’s five top hotels to collect delegates for the WalesRegeneration Summit and to drive them the two miles to the summit Liberty Stadium.

He arrived at my hotel at 7.25 am with no passengers having called at the Premier Inn.

‘I expect they’re all having a lie-in,’ he said generously. ‘They’re waiting for my second run.’

We waited in silence while a disc jockey on the radio discussed the life and bad times of Kerry Katona.

Half an hour later, I arrived at Liberty Stadium the only passenger in a 50-seater coach.

I have no idea whether the coach was more popular an hour later.

Somehow, 300 delegates made their way to Swansea.

As with all conference these days, there were plenty of green statistics.

The irony of the coach was not lost on me.

How much had my shapely carbon footprint been elongated by being the only passenger on a 50-seater coach?

I am sure the Welsh Assembly Government, the organisers of the summit, has all its green credentials in place, turning off lights and outlawing standby buttons.

But before organising another shuttle bus at taxpayers’ expense, it should check with delegates to make sure they are green enough to travel by coach.

I often bluff about my extensive travels. Wigan Pier? Of course I have been to Wigan Pier.

When I was invited to breakfast at the Southwark Lido, I pretended I knew the lovingly listed and restored 1930s open air swimming pool, reopened to hardy swimmers.

In reality, I wondered how I could have worked in Southwark for five years without having discovered its lido.

When I arrived at 100 Union Street SE1, the joke was on me.

The quirky developer, Roger Zogolovitch, chairman of Solid Space, had taken the site for which he had consent for offices, flats and restaurants and installed a lido. It was less than a meter wide and as long as the average ornamental fish pond.

As part of the celebrations for the London Festival of Architecture, Zogolovitch had covered the site with shingle and installed 10 beach huts and a few dozen deckchairs. Festival workers lived in the beach huts during the month-long festival.

It was a cheerful way to keep interest alive in one of many hundred of development sites where nothing else is happening in property development.

Zogolovitch was upbeat as the trains thundered behind and above him on Southwark viaduct and the social housing tenants on the opposite side of Union Street must have wondered was going on.

He called his un-started development SoSo to catch the glamour of Soho and Noho.

Yet the whole cheerful open air breakfast was reminiscent of the early 1990s.

Then, everyone enjoyed stories of naïve shed agents who leased out empty warehouses unknowingly for ecstasy-fuelled raves. My own experiences were more cerebral because office agents hired gold chairs and experimental theatre companies to try out new works in unlettable office space.

I have not yet swum in Southwark Lido, and don’t know whether it will be reinstated for the next London Festival of Architecture. But maybe in this downturn, I’ll discover the next Pinter of Ionesco.