Today’s London is a sprawling metropolis, teeming with energy and seemingly swallowing up all in its path, stretching from Surrey to Kent and Essex and receiving around 16 million visitors annually – over twice its own population.

Automobile Association of Britain, Illustrated Guide to Britain

London is a museum world, and the museum, like the cathedral or the palazzo in their day, is the dominant symbol of our postmodern times. A museum is an imposing assemblage of bits and pieces, history for attention-deficit amnesiacs.

Wendy Steiner (b.1949), The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism

London is a city that has reinvented itself upon the remains of the past.

Leo Hollis (b.1972), London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London

To us London is a hundred different places. It is never easy to know exactly what we mean when we use the word. Indeed, to the question ” What is London? ” there is no satisfactory answer, unless it be that it is the original little walled city that still exists. It contains St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Mansion House, the Guildhall, the Bank of England and London Bridge. Thousands of people work there in the day-time, but no one sleeps there at night but the Lord Mayor of London and a few hundred caretakers. Yet the physical boundaries of this ancient city are still visible. It is still possible to walk along the line of the Roman Wall that centuries ago limited the size of London to one square mile.

H. V. Morton (1892-1979), In Search of London

And yet London is a solid city, in spite of the broken images it evokes in the mind of a wanderer like myself. There is a grandeur there, an impersonal power of endurance that is somehow comforting beneath the rot.

James Wright (1927-1980), A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright