London is among the most vibrant, fascinating cities in the world, seemingly limitless in its variety, but it’s also sprawling and cacophonous, making impossible demands on our time, attention and purse.

Henry Eliot and Matt Lloyd-Rose, Curiocity, in pursuit of London

The greatest glory that has ever come to me was to be swallowed up in London, not knowing a soul, with no means of subsistence, and the fun of working till the stars went out.

J. M. Barrie (1860-1937)

There’s a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And the vermin of the world / Inhabit it . . . / And it goes by the name of London.

Stephen Sondheim (b.1930), Sweeney Todd

This melancholy London – I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), letter to Katharine Tynan, 25th August, 1888

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

China Tom Miéville (b.1972), Kraken