The best bribe which London offers to-day to the imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope to confront their counterparts.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

London, thou art the flower of cities all! Gemme of all joy, jasper of jocunditie.

William Dumbar (c.1459-1530)

There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it . . . / And it goes by the name of London.

Stephen Sondheim (b.1930), Sweeney Todd

This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), letter to Katharine Tynan, 25th August, 1888

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

China Tom Miéville (b.1972), Kraken