Of all the London phenomenon I’ve chronicled recently, there is one that has been gathering pace. It’s called Business Change.

I’m suddenly more aware of the breathtaking and surprising speed that familiar haunts, restaurants and bars seem to be going out of business, closing down and then getting replaced by a new business. I only note it down now after a recent few trips into town that left me sad at the disappearance of quite a few of my regular haunts and drop in places. Cafes, book shops, restaurants and music equipment places all suddenly biting the dust. You head to an old familiar café hoping to get egg and chips and suddenly it’s a trendy new Japanese hairdressers decorated in black and silver with bright cartoon characters on the windows offering wakami face tugging and Nintendo hair stress with kodo roots and sea turtle mud. All very disconcerting.

I know it’s a recession year unfolding, but it’s very London in the way that there seems to have suddenly been a speedy pick up in the opening and closing rates of so many once great places. It’s as if the capital is sensing blood in the water. The old and sick are culled (sadly often by the chain groups) and the whole place seems to be getting blander and less original by comparison.

We all know that London constantly changes – just look at the sprawling developments in regeneration areas. Even bits of the new Stratford are starting to look quite pleasant. Actually, scratch that. It’s still a dump, but now with an inappropriate huge shopping centre and bits of Olympic nonsense being stuck around the place.But it’s funny how a couple of converted factories or hospitals reborn as apartments seems to immediately change the tone in an area – even if it’s only very surface to start with. Hackney and Battersea has enclaves and pockets of said new conversions but are both still struggling. So-called luxury developments can only achieve so much. The muggers just seem better read – now quoting Monica Ali and The Secret as they rob your wallet.

But the onward rush of change and the trend to new designer living has a lot to answer for. One of my prime examples is Paddington Basin. Now changed – from an admittedly smelly canal side dump – but changed to a monolithic mixed office and apartment, antiseptic, dystopian, concrete wasteland -replete with confusing enormous steel statues and various bits of naff looking public ‘heritage’ art.

As you enter, you find great grey pebble-dashed wind tunnels threading through various soulless glass and steel monoliths that abound the place, all giving it the charming air of a car park designed by Philip Starck, The Mad Hatter and Mr Angry. And the entire place is complete with faux cobbles and café canal side living (ie chain outlets sticking tables outside). Sadly, the whole place has slightly less atmosphere than Jupiter. You can see baffled canal side walkers leave little leafy and cute Little Venice and then turn up in what appears to be an architect’s giant scale model of dullness and concrete. “It’s all neat and clean and functional,” they tell me. But then so are abattoirs,  which it sort of gives the half air of being modelled on – only without the welcome death at the end after spending any time there. But that’s London. Changeville.

And if you needed more proof of changes, look no further than the past few year’s restaurant trends. Scores of Thai, Vietnamese, Mongol Grills and Pan Asian buffet places appearing and disappearing within a two-year period. Now it’s the Lebanese wave I’m noticing. They’re popping up everywhere. Nice, but generally overpriced. And often with the hookah pipes outside, gently wafting aromatic smoke down the street. And snapping at their heels, those very cool-looking Japanese places. All Zen and noodles with raw everything (just saving on the gas bill I’m guessing. Personally, I like my food cooked).

But don’t panic. There are still places that show no sign of seemingly changing one iota. South Kensington and its environs is a case in point. I had the dubious pleasure of being taken to a basement restaurant down that way last week. The prices? Unfeasibly high. The place? Packed to the rafters with an orderly line patiently waiting by the till area when we arrived. The noise levels? Slightly above that of runway one at Heathrow. And the food? Italian pizzas mainly – but disguised as high fashion cuisine. And then that bizarre welcome. Table for six? Yes, of course, but you’ll have to leave at 10.00 sharp (it was 8.00). The people with me seemed unsurprised. Didn’t they mind?, I asked. “No,” they chorused. “It’s a London thing.”