And yet London is a solid city, in spite of the broken images it evokes in the mind of a wanderer like myself. There is a grandeur there, an impersonal power of endurance that is somehow comforting beneath the rot.

James Wright (1927-1980), A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright

London is a cluster of communities, great and small, famous and unsung; a city of contrasts, a congregation of diversity.

Roy Porter (1946-2002), London: A Social History

London is a city that sleeps too much. This is the mould of its quality. A magnetic contract: to reinvent itself on the other side of dream, each day. And such dreams, smouldering against the tidal spine of the river, telling and retelling the tales that must be told to manifest a city’s bones. Whispering the night architecture back into stone.

Iain Sinclair (b.1943), London: A City of Disappearances

London isn’t a stodgy place. Trend-setting London is to the United Kingdom what New York City is to the United States: the spot where everything happens first (or ultimately ends up).

Donald Olson (b.1950), England For Dummies

I think London’s sexy because it’s so full of eccentrics.

Rachel Weisz (b.1970)