Look beyond the cold, impersonal uniformity of modern apartment blocks and you’ll find a city’s older quarters, where the glow of windows at dusk reflects a place’s psyche and tells stories about the people within.

Paris to London
Suppose you leave Paris one evening on the Eurostar, departing just as it begins to get dark. You glimpse the first lit lamps illuminating apartment windows as the train heads north past Haussmannian façades, postwar blocks and bungalows. Then you cross flat, evening-misted fields that show only the far-off lights of quiet villages. You move quickly through the bright, slick station at Lille and on through dark countryside to the Channel. Sitting at a window table, you soon spot London outside, recognising it by its paired sash windows in three-storey houses that are as characteristic of the city as its plane trees and flagstone pavements.

Wherever my travels have taken me, I have always been drawn to the glow of a lighted window viewed from without. Over the years my interest has helped me to understand these openings as ways to decode and decipher a city. Sometimes they’re clues to its history, climate or how the neighbourhood came to be – which overweening architect or developer won the tussle or triumphed in the style wars. But often a city’s windows betray something about its soul too. 

Amsterdam 
When I lived in the Netherlands I always felt that the streets and canal quays of old houses offered glimpses of a society going about its evening business. Sometimes this could be seen in magnificent rooms from the past but usually in a much more domestic order. Dutch windows tend to be large in proportion to the rest of the house: back when the canal house was evolving, buildings on reclaimed land had to be as light as possible and I suspect that glass was as cheap as brick.

In those years, the custom of leaving windows uncurtained was almost universal. Because of this Protestant demonstration of having nothing to hide, an extraordinary succession of rooms and lives presented themselves in the lighted windows of early evening. Here’s a young lawyer, her briefcase beside her on the sofa, reading the evening paper; there you see a family setting a round table with a light hanging low over it, the corners of the room in velvety shadow like in an oil painting by an Old Master. Then on into the streets of larger houses and past different windows: painted beams lit from below; a ceiling with an oval of dusk-yellowed clouds and swallows in flight; a sombre and perfect room with dove-grey walls and a pair of 17th-century portraits of a black-clad husband and wife.

Almost always, these lighted, beautiful ground-floor rooms in the patrician houses are as empty as the streets outside at nightfall. Sparse footsteps on brick paving, the rustle of chestnut branches, leaves turning in the streetlight as they fall into the canal, like yellow stars floating on the black water. Perhaps the inhabitants of these streets and rooms are wise to be inside, gathered around tables, huddled at the back of their houses and away from prying eyes. Perhaps those larger windows are simply performative spaces? Dutch windows are less transparent than they seem.

Baltimore
The streets in the historic centre of Baltimore are often as empty as Dutch streets at dusk and very few show lights – a couple of restaurants, a scatter of townhouses, now members’ clubs. The lit windows of one brick mansion from the 1850s, transformed into flats, illuminate pots of herbs on the landings of its metal fire escapes. Reuse in action. It feels very unlike the Netherlands; Baltimore’s streets and squares feel abandoned – or rather as though they had never really been inhabited.

The northern suburbs seem more animated but that changes as soon as you leave the main roads. Walking into the streets of large houses with ample front gardens, you turn into near darkness with sparse streetlights and great tracts of dark in between. There is pavement on only one side of the street and the muddy verges of the unfenced lawns on the other are deep with wet leaves. 

The unmistakable patterns of the lighted windows of the houses in their spacious plots appear with considerable distances between them. This is what happens when cities sprawl. You can see the symmetrical patterns of the classical houses with their glazing bars and occasionally the unbroken horizontal stripes of the internationally modern. The whole effect is somehow ghostly. This American mood is captured by the haunting night paintings of Linden Frederick and the sombre photographs of Todd Hido and Gregory Crewdson, many showing the lonely beauty of these streets, a world away from dense city-centre living before suburbanisation took hold.

Rome
Perhaps the most glorious view that the Eternal City can offer is at nightfall on the Piazza Farnese, looking up through vast windows into the great room of the piano nobile of the Farnese palace, its sumptuous walls and coffered ceiling illuminated for a reception. Walk the beguiling tangle of streets between the Piazza Navona and the river, with the elegant antique shop windows at street level in the Via dei Coronari, and you’ll see a gilded figure in one and a painted screen or Venetian-green lacquer chairs in another. 

Gaze up at the plain stuccoed palace wall above and an open shutter reveals a room like a painted cabinet for a baroque prince, its panels ornamented with fantastical grotesques. These Roman palaces afford ample space to the aesthetic arrangement of large windows. In summer the aristocratic inhabitants would leave the city – that space of public exhibition and exuberance – for a more domestic setting of villas where there was less need for defence against the day’s simmering heat. That might not be how people live now but it’s a window into a long-gone past: a grandeur that few contemporary buildings can aspire to.

Edinburgh
Almost every window in central Edinburgh is fitted with thick wooden shutters. Once these are closed every housefront becomes a great slab of stone against the mounting darkness. This response to an austere climate adds a rather spooky quality to night walks in the Georgian city: pearl-white light, imitating the glow of gas lamps, strikes dark façades of blind windows concealing unguessable lives. At street level the only time for the stroller to survey the lighted windows is the hour of nightfall; while walking along the elegant length of Heriot Row or along the astonishing Royal Terrace, the beautiful ground-floor drawing rooms, with their classical chimneypieces and fine paintings, are briefly visible before the shutters close and the New Town, on its windy slope, turns to cliffs of stone.

London
My favourite streets are the late-Georgian ones in central London, from Mayfair to Marylebone, from Fitzrovia to Bloomsbury. You cross crowded, blazing Oxford Street and then relish the dim, low-rise streets and squares beyond for their regular, scrutable patterns of lighted windows. The shop displays in their capsule of light; the colours of tall, curtained first-floor drawing room windows; the flat blue of the cold counters in the closed lunchtime coffee shops. 

Mist and winter transport these streets back in time and into fiction: the windows glimmering through the fog stand for the mysteries of the city, a labyrinth of evening rooms into which Holmes, Scrooge or Jeeves and Wooster might at any moment burst. There are other secrets: in Great Russell Street, there is an extraordinary apparition, if you look up at the right moment, of a painted baroque heaven of brilliant clouds. There are figures of the deserted Ariadne and the young god Bacchus floating in fictive space, in the past, behind the glazing bars of a first-floor window.

Anywhere
Old streets, wherever I find them, still seem to nurture the walker, anchor them in the history of a place and offer endless subtle clues as to how to be human and near others, physically and socially. But most modern apartment blocks, and the voids between them, feel uprooted from place and history. They feel blank and transitory. Wherever I go, I find newer housing blocks disquieting and disorientating. They are illegible within the city. Little distinguishes them as dwellings – they could be offices or hospitals. They squat in streets and refuse all contact with the people below, offering no information, orientation or interaction to the passer-by. Instead, these blocks seem to stare straight ahead at other tall buildings or out at the empty, unwelcoming night beyond.