It’s brilliant, you can’t ever get bored of London ‘cos even if you live here for like a hundred and fifty years you still won’t ever know everything about it. There’s always something new. Like, you’re walking round somewhere you’ve known since you was born and you look up and there’s an old clock on the side of a building you never seen before, or there’s a little gargoyley face over a window or something.

Richard Rider, No Beginning, No End

Down in Farringdon Street the carts, wagons, vans, cabs, omnibuses crossed and intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could resist.

George Gissing (1857-1903), The Nether World

London is a bad habit one hates to lose.

Anon

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), The Life of Samuel Johnson

London’s like a bad set of teeth. There are gaps, there are bad dental bridges just about holding on and there are rotting stumps that needed to be pulled ages ago.

John Lawton (b.1949), Then We Take Berlin