The Companion Guide to London [antikvár]

Introduction " London is the most interesting, beautiful, and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant totality. . . Though H. G. Wells wrote that (in The New Machiavelli, 1911), before the onslaught of two world wars, and when London was the hub of the world in her imperial might, it is still in the 1960's as true-and even though she is no longer the largest of cities, third now to Tokyo and New York, and on somé counts (depending where you fix her limits), tenth or eleventh in the world. Greater London is usually accepted as holding somewhat over eight millión Londoners. Enough anyway, and the size of their corporate home strikes dumb many a traveller whether stooping in over the great web towards London Airport through the shifting cloud, or driving in from the Airport to a London air terminál (a journey which is likely to take him longer than the transit from London Airport to Paris), or coming in by train or car through mile upon mile of brick villás and terraces. The impression of stupendous totality will remain with the traveller even when well orientated within London, but in contrast with it the investigation of the city's incidental and multitudinous littlenesses is all the more astonishing and rewarding. To know London, who is liable to conceal her delights, the only way is by close scrutiny. Yet London is alsó the classic example of the scattered city, as against the concentrated city such as Paris; her observers still often analyse her as a network of villages about the two twin cities of London and Westminster, and this alsó is still true. To deal with the whole system of these "villages" would involve many more years' work and a length of text beyond the scope of a single volume, so this book has, in the interests of practicability, to be confined to the heart of the matter, virtually the City and the West End. I have made attempts, in chapter 28, to indicate the nature of the interest c.g.l.-a29