Goodness me, isn’t London big? It seems to start about twenty minutes after you leave Dover and just goes on and on, mile after mile . . .

Bill Bryson (b. 1951), Notes from a Small Island

London is like a woman with too many years to encourage confession.

Louise Closser Hale (1872-1933), We Discover New England

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. / Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Waste Land

Proportion . . . You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist . . . It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way . . . We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Antic Hay

A flat black bug, that’s London.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), The Sky above the Roof