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

And London shops on Christmas Eve / Are strung with silver bells and flowers / As hurrying clerks the City leave / To pigeon-haunted classic towers, / And marbled clouds go scudding by / The many-steepled London sky.

John Betjeman (1906-1984), Christmas

London is like the grave in one respect – any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Sketch of the Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Living in London is like being an inmate of a reformatory school. Everywhere you turn you run into some regulation designed for your own protection. The Government is like the School Matron with her keys jangling at her waist. She orders you about, good-humouredly enough, but all the same, in no uncertain terms.

Charles Ritchie (1906-1955), The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945

I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It’s freezing and it starts to rain and it’s the ugliest bus I’ve ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds.

David Thewlis (b.1963), The Late Hector Kipling