In London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in.

Paddington Bear

I’ve been walking about London for the last 30 years, and I find something fresh in it everyday.

Walter Besant (1836-1901)

I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe. / In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear, / In every voice: in every ban, / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear / How the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls, / And the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls / But most thro’ midnight streets I hear / How the youthful Harlots curse / Blasts the new-born Infants tear / And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

William Blake (1916-1997), Songs of Innocence and of Experience

I’ve been sitting on the edge of the bed for an hour in a complete daze. I told him if I die tonight I’ll die happy, it’s all here, everything’s here.

Helene Hanff (1916-1997), The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street

Because the fact is that Harry Potter is not American. He is British. Where is Diagon Alley, where they buy wands and stuff? It is in London, and if you want to get into the Ministry of Magic you disappear down a London telephone box. The train for Hogwarts goes from King’s Cross, not Grand Central Station, and what is Harry Potter all about? It is about the ritual and intrigue and dorm-feast excitement of a British boarding school of a kind that you just don’t find in America. Hogwarts is a place where children occasionally get cross with each other—not ‘mad’—and where the situation is usually saved by a good old British sense of HUMOUR. WITH A U. RIGHT? NOT HUMOR. GOTTIT?

Boris Johnson (b.1964)