London doesn’t love the latent or the lurking, has neither time, nor taste, nor sense for anything less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high.

Henry James (1843-1916), The Awkward Age

I had been in London innumerable times, and yet that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London – the fact that it costs money even to sit down.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

I’ve been walking about London for the last thirty years, and I find something fresh in it every day.

Walter Besant (1836-1901), on his deathbed, 9th June 1901

The City of London, whose resident population hardly equals that of Dover, but whose precincts over a million persons enter daily, Sunday excepted, on business bent.

A. H. Beavan, Imperial London