Down in Farringdon Street the carts, wagons, vans, cabs, omnibuses crossed and intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could resist.

George Gissing (1857-1903), The Nether World

London is a bad habit one hates to lose.

Anon

Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), The Life of Samuel Johnson

London’s like a bad set of teeth. There are gaps, there are bad dental bridges just about holding on and there are rotting stumps that needed to be pulled ages ago.

John Lawton (b.1949), Then We Take Berlin

And London shops on Christmas Eve / Are strung with silver bells and flowers / As hurrying clerks the City leave / To pigeon-haunted classic towers, / And marbled clouds go scudding by / The many-steepled London sky.

John Betjeman (1906-1984), Christmas