Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It’s chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.
China Miéville (b.1972)
On 10 March 1886 the First Great Terrier Show precursor to Cruft’s was organised in London by Spratt’s dog biscuit salesman Charles Cruft
Temple Bar on Fleet Street displayed decapitated traitors heads on spikes after being boiled in brine and cumin seeds to deter pecking birds
On Knight’s Road Docklands the world’s largest tin of syrup is affixed to Tate & Lyle’s factory producing the world’s oldest branded product
In his will Dickens stipulated that no monuments be erected to his memory, that’s why London has no statues of one of its greatest writers
On 10 March 1914 suffragette Mary Richardson attacked Velazquez’s painting the Rokeby Venus, hanging in the National Gallery, with an axe
Now charmingly inaccurate, the life-sized models of dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, constructed in the 1850s were the first in the world
The basement at 27 Endell Street was once the animal depot for West End theatres once two bulls escaped liberating a menagerie on Soho streets
A white strip near BBC White City marks the finish of the world’s first modern marathon in 1908 originally 25 miles extended to 26m 385yards
Early rear view mirrors in taxis couldn’t be adjusted allegedly to prevent drivers from ogling the legs of their lady passengers
South Bank’s Anchor Brewery, once the largest brewery in the world, all that remains is the old brewery tap the Anchor Tavern on Park Street
Burrell & Co on Blasker Walk Docklands once manufactured dyes, red smoke from the chimneys would tint the local pigeons rose-pink
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