I walk to Oxford Street and climb on the number 8. It’s freezing and it starts to rain and it’s the ugliest bus I’ve ever seen, rattling down the ugliest streets, in the ugliest city, in the ugliest country, in the ugliest of all possible worlds.

David Thewlis (b.1963), The Late Hector Kipling

Goodness me, isn’t London big? It seems to start about twenty minutes after you leave Dover and just goes on and on, mile after mile . . .

Bill Bryson (b. 1951), Notes from a Small Island

London is like a woman with too many years to encourage confession.

Louise Closser Hale (1872-1933), We Discover New England

Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many. / Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, / And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. / Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stock of nine.

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Waste Land

Proportion . . . You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist . . . It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way . . . We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Antic Hay