London, England. Through nursery rhymes and songs we absorb London before we know it exists; arriving in the city for the first time can be an odd homecoming, an eerie dejà vu. There are the red double-decker buses; the bobbies and impassive Beefeaters; Westminster Abbey, rising more from the haze of memory than from the morning fog; and the notes of Big Ben, knelling through the mists as we have come to believe all bells must toll.
Yet London is not quaint. The city of the Queen and the Sex Pistols, of Paddington Bear and Doc Martens fights for your attention. London is neither a park nor a museum, though you could spend all your time going from one to the next. It is a booming urban sprawl, with traffic snarls, porno shops, and an astonishingly international population. Though the city is not the peerless world capita! it was last century, criticism rolls off stony London like a March rain.