November 9, 1989: Television screens across Europe flicker with hammers, songs, and a wall coming down. At the same moment in a maternity ward in Woolwich, London, a girl named Elena Nowak Davis arrives, a shrill cry timed with the roar of history. How We Got Here is her story.
Elena grows up in a flat on the Ferrier Estate with a faded London A to Z pinned above her cot and a shoebox of her mother Marta's keepsakes under the bed: a red Polish passport, ration cards from the 1980s, a thin gold ring bent out of shape. From Deptford Market to the Woolwich ferry, she learns to read a city by its margins. Decades later, Elena has become a historian renowned for her work with family archives and postwar Britain. When charismatic developer Giles Hartwell commissions her to curate a landmark exhibition about migration and renewal for a private museum rising over the razed blocks of her childhood estate, she accepts. It is the sort of project that could make a career and reframe a city's memory.
As design meetings pile up in a glass office overlooking the Thames Barrier, Elena finds herself slipping into older rooms: the British Library's Manuscripts Reading Room, a kitchen in Gdańsk steeped in dill and steam, a Stasi Records Agency annex in Lichtenberg where names are still caught on onion skin. She recalls a first great love at UCL, nights on the 53 bus, her father Peter's union hall on Plumstead High Street, the summer she married Marco Lozano and the winter they grew apart. A chipped enamel mug, a Singer sewing machine that missed a ship by a week, a letter posted at Anhalter Bahnhof and never delivered become clues in a larger map.
As opening day draws near, Elena must choose between the polished story Hartwell wants and the unruly truths she owes to Marta, to her daughter Sylvie, and to the people who once dried laundry between tower blocks where a gift shop now gleams. With tenderness and a cartographer's eye, How We Got Here traces the cracked pavements that lead from ordinary rooms to public squares, asking what endures of love, duty, and ambition when the places that made us no longer stand.
