Sir, when a man is tired of London,
he is tired of life. -- Dr. Johnson

My blog entry I met a character from Dickens stirred up nostalgia for London even among some who have never been there.

The great city lives in our imaginations like no other, perhaps because of the novelists who have so memorably populated it for us:

Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, William Makepeace Thackery, George Gissing, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Compton Mackinzie, Virginia Woolf, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch. And then Shakespeare and the incomparable Johnson and his Boswell.

If the physical city is burned, bombed, bulldozed and stripped of the past through urban renewal, the London of our imaginations
endures rich and full. RE
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Blackfriar's Bridge in 1896
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Petticoat Lane in 1903
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A rather amazing and nearly crystal-clear color motion picture
of London in 1927.
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A magic camera's futuristic visions on London in 1924
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The Blitz, 1941
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The victory celebrations of 1945
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"Of all the seats in all theaters in the world, the best seat is on the front of the top of a London omnibus." -- Henry James
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Driving the A13
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A cruise on the Thames, 1983
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The haunted London Underground
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