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

London is a cluster of communities, great and small, famous and unsung; a city of contrasts, a congregation of diversity.

Roy Porter (1946-2002), London: A Social History

London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city’s bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone.

Iain Sinclair (b.1943), London: A City of Disappearances

London isn’t a stodgy place. Trend-setting London is to the United Kingdom what New York City is to the United States: the spot where everything happens first (or ultimately ends up).

Donald Olson (b.1950), England For Dummies