When he had first arrived, he had found London huge, odd, fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map, that elegant multicoloured topographical display of underground railway lines and stations, giving it any semblance of order. Gradually he realized that the Tube map was a handy fiction that made life easier but bore no resemblance to the reality of the shape of the city above. It was like belonging to a political party, he thought once, proudly, and then, having tried to explain the resemblance between the Tube map and politics, at a party, to a cluster of bewildered strangers, he had decided in the future to leave political comment to others.

Neil Gaiman (b.1960), Neverwhere

There is no river in the world to be compared for majesty and the witchery of association, to the Thames; it impresses even the unreading and unimaginative watcher with a solemnity which he cannot account for, as it rolls under his feet and swirls past the buttresses of its many bridges; he may think, as he experiences the unusual effect, that it is the multiplicity of buildings which line its banks, or the crowd of sea-craft which floats upon its surface, or its own extensive spread. In reality, he feels, although he cannot explain it, the countless memories which hang forever like a spiritual fog over its rushing current.

Hume Nisbet, Gaslit Nightmares “The Phantom Model”: Stories by Robert W. Chambers, Charles Dickens, Richard Marsh, and others

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It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

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

The essential London scenes is a row of low identical houses set around a square.

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

They come, not to see what London is, or even what it was, but to confirm a kind of picture-postcard view of both, all red telephone kiosks and fog-wreathed alleyways.

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