Backstroke through the past and remember how Alfred the Great dug the Channelsea to keep out Danes and how the mill streams powered on through centuries. Waterworks were King. Swoop underwater through the Prescott Channel, touching pieces of the lost Euston Arch as you go and break surface among reeds, oak, willow, ash. Shoot under the stadium itself, where the little Pudding Mill River runs: at last, dive up into a building shaped like a wave and swim your heart out, for you are all gold.

Jo Shapcott, Wild Swimmer

You see most of the boys were looking upwards… it was wonder that lifted their eyes. They finally arrive in London town. And let me tell you, the Mother Country – this thought-I-knew-you place – was bewildering these Jamaican boys. See them pointing at the train that rumbles across the bridge. They looked shocked when billowing black smoke puffed its way around the white washing hung on drying lines – the sheets, the pants, the babies’ bonnets… even the sunshine can find no colour but grey.

Andrea Levy, Small Island

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.

Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

I made myself ready presently, and walked to the Tower… and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire… Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were some of them burned, their wings, and fell down.

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Two hundred years from today, a master bell-maker will set out from Whitechapel, with instructions to retune the great Olympic Bell. The bell-maker has never seen the bell, but she knows it will still be there.

There are some objects that history tiptoes round, and leaves undisturbed, rocks in the river of change. The bell-maker will stroll through leafy London. The mad roads and high-density housing are gone now, all overgrown. London 2212 is mostly trees.

No one really builds things any more, not since we learnt to manipulate vegetable DNA. Why build a house when you can grow one? A house that grows as your family grows. A house you can prune when it gets too big. A house that grows food on the kitchen wall. A house that breathes oxygen. The biggest breakthrough came when we learnt to grow computers – computers that climb up from the patio and pull information down from the cloud like sunshine.

The bell-maker, for instance, is following a trail of smartleaves that rustle directions as she strolls through the Forest of Bow. There, in a clearing, its wooden gantry covered in creepers, she’ll find the bell. The size of it surprises her. She had no idea it would be this big. It takes all her strength to get the clapper to swing hard enough to strike a note from the huge metal dome. And what a note – vast, rich and complex. Its tones and overtones and half tones unfolding like petals as it breezes through the forest. Every cell in her body vibrates.

When the sound passes through the cloud, it will activate all the memories that were stored there on the day the bell was first rung – the ancient Facebook likes and recommends, the digital photo, blog entries, texts – and these will be downloaded to the bell-maker’s memory in a shower of smartpollen. When she breathes in, she’ll inhale the rhythm of drums, the flash of fireworks, the happy screams of children, the waves of the athletes and the lyrics of songs. But what will she make of those lyrics? Will she wonder who, apart from tigers, had tiger feet? Was it a good thing? And what is tiger light? Does it burn bright in the forests of the night?

Will she try to figure out what exactly that Starman was waiting for in the sky? Will scholars try to work out who Scaramouche was and whether he ever did do the fandango? And what Galileo and Figaro have to do with it? And why everyone was shouting about it? Or will she already know that the best pop lyrics are often nonsense. Even the lyrics of the greatest, and the most important pop songs. ‘Wopbopaloobop a whop bam boo’ for instance. Or ‘Na, na, na, na-na-na naaaa’. ‘Hey Jude’ – possibly the Beatles’ biggest-selling single – ends with almost four minutes of ‘na na nas’. Anyone who has ever stood in a vast crowd and na na na’d along with it, knows that meaning doesn’t matter. The important thing is the way that chorus allows us to karaoke ourselves into the moment. It binds us together, both as members of the crowd and as part of the ongoing reverberation of that summer afternoon in Twickenham in 1968 when four young men first recorded it.

Because the lyrics are a handle – a way of holding onto the song, keeping it in your memory, bedding it into your hard drive. In a way, the more meaningless they are, the more power the song has. The less it said, the less there is to disagree with. Clever people have often tried to prove that pop music is important by showing us how deep and meaningful the lyrics can be. But we don’t want meaning from a pop song really. Pop isn’t important for what it says. It’s important for what it does. Or what it lets us do. It lets us play and when we play we do amazing things.

Popular music and technological innovation are brother and sister. The first computer programmes were the cards which bell ringers made to help them remember the order of ringing. Ever since then music and computers have walked together. Bands like Pink Floyd and musicians like Mike Oldfield and Brian Eno searching for new sounds and new ways to create music had a massive impact on the development of computers.

File sharing and downloading were the catalysts of social networking. And in recent years – in the Arab Spring, for instance – they’ve been agents for social change. Like the bells that first inspired them, they are part of the story of liberty. What’s the point of playing if you don’t share? We play best when we’re together. Maybe that’s what we really want from all public art – not insight or knowledge but an excuse to get together in a state of pleasant perplexity, to be part of each other’s lives. Because, in the end, what matters most to us is each other.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, London 2212