In many ways, London is like a great big pinata, and everyone who lives here is like an excited, blindfolded child with a heart full of hope and a big flailing stick. Aim that stick right and London will split at the seams like a ruptured spleen, showering you with the most extraordinary places to visit, places like you won’t find anywhere else in the world. Get it wrong and the chances are you’ll lose your footing and end up in a frustrated, eyeless heap.

Paul Carr (b.1979), London by London

London is like a cold dark dream sometimes.

Jean Rhys (1890-1979), Wide Sargasso Sea

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City, / Where the River flows, with foreign flotations. / There I was told: we have too many churches, / And too few chop-houses.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Rock

London opens to you like a novel itself . . . It is divided into chapters, the chapters into scenes, the scenes into sentences; it opens to you like a series of rooms, door, passsage, door. Mayfair to Piccadilly to Soho to the Strand.

Anna Quindlen (b.1953), Imagined London: A Tour of the World’s Greatest Fictional City

Go where we may, rest where we will, Eternal London haunts us still.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Rhymes on the Road, The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore