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

A flat black bug, that’s London.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896), The Sky above the Roof

London is a splendid place to live in for those who can get out of it.

George John Gordon Bruce (1883-1967), The Observer, 1st October, 1944

Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.

John le Carré (b.1931), Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy