Dreamers: Many Polish builders move to London with plans to one day return home and build a mansion for themeselves. 

Every morning a busy little woman would unbolt the lower ground door and dash out to stock up on brass polish. Jurek would make a point of greeting her: "Good day, Madam." He imagined her to be an oligarch's wife. But she would giggle and rush inside. "Thank you, Mister." He did this for about a month until one of the bricklayers took him aside. "The owners are in Russia, dipshit. The gooks are the maids." 

Builders know clothes are very powerful things. Try sitting on the Tube covered in paint and dust and sweat after a day hammering and sawing and hauling. Commuters will make that one extra step away. Corner shopkeepers will sneer at you. You will become less visible. 

I worked on a site in Pimlico. My job consisted exclusively of loading rubbish. There is more of this on a building site than you can possibly imagine: wood shavings and plaster drippings, untold chunks of MDF, boundless rubble, foam wrapping and glass shards. Renovating a £2.5 million flat for £7 an hour was a bunch of dreamers. There was Stas, who in his ten years working in London had learned only 12 words of English, most of them swearwords. He was a living dictionary of farming obscenities that should be preserved by the Polish Academy for post-industrial generations. He liked nothing better than ripping out windows and spitting long distances. 

For ten years he had sworn at co-worker Jacek, a spindly painter from Kraków who knew maybe 20 words of English, all of them paint-related. They were both like sailors, renovating London for nine months and then back to Poland. Stas claimed to have a wife but I found this difficult to believe. Like a sailor, he didn't know how to live another way. 

Jacek had a colonel's moustache. This painter was here because his daughter had Down's syndrome. Every pound he could spare was sent back to pay for her care home in Germany. He welled up explaining there are no such institutions in Poland. Jacek's sacrifice meant that at the age of 50 he had shared damp rooms his entire adult life. 

Lunch breaks on the worktops around the pots and drills and coiled wires were like a property developers' convention. Plasterers kept interrupting each other: "This flat is pathetic . . . Not even a key to the garden square." The painters puffed up to interject. "We decorated a £3 million mansion in Wimbledon last week!"