This summer I went to one place completely different from the cookie-cutter British cities, the Medieval Toledo, only half an hour from Madrid on the High-Speed Train. Toledo sits atop an excrutiating hill, beige and roasting in the intense heat, a walled city that was once home to the three religions that coexisted in Spain for so long: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. As such it is home to mosques, synagogues and a massive cathedral, and this and its many classic works by El Greco and its proximity to the capital make it a huge tourist attraction. And there are tourists in droves, from everywhere; in fact the majority of the population appear to be tourists. This creates a strange and entirely different dynamic. For apart from tourist shops selling post-cards and souvenirs, and the occasional corner store stocked with water and ice-creams, there appear to be no amenities whatsoever in Toledo. No businesses, no supermarkets, no car parks (although somehow there are still cars). It is a city trapped in the time warp of its own beauty and value as a historical reference. There is indeed a modern Toledo, but from the perspective of the walled city it seems to be another town entirely. It is no doubt a Toledo of Zara and Mango and Pizza Hut, of ordinary Spanish citizens who go about their days without ever thinking to visit the historic city on the hill, which like the area of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, or like Venice, perhaps, now exists almost exclusively to be seen by outsiders.

Reflecting on Toledo from the thankfully air-conditioned train once more, I had to conclude that it is lacking something essential as a city. Although I may, from my North American perspective, want old Europe to look like old Europe, I don´t want the museum experience of Old Europe. While there is some aspect of this in all historic city centres, the Toledo experience was particularly strange in that there was no escape. There were no quiet streets where only locals go to search for and enjoy (perhaps there were, I was only there for an afternoon, but they were well hidden if so). There were no cafe tables without a camera resting on top. If you wanted to communicate a secret, Spanish would probably be the best language to do it in. In short, Toledo seemed in desperate need of something, anything, to make it less of a picture postcard and more of a real place, even if that something were a global brand business.

I am no more in favour of the generic high street than before, but I do believe that if that is how people live, and I am on an exploratory tour of another country, then I should see it. The Toledo of the past would not have been this pristine world heritage site, it would have been full to bursting with people buying and selling and eating and drinking, and paying more attention to the price of the dress in the window than to the beauty of the cathedral, much as any modern European going through their modern-medieval-timeless main square would do today. Perhaps it is better to consider the intrusion of present realities onto an antique canvas as simply a natural progression of history, rather than as a visual offence. And, of course, train a new generation of architects who will bring a hopefully more aesthetically pleasing form of modern building to the city core.

Not that I advocate McDonalds, anywhere…