London

We know them as Cornhill and Ludgate Hill, with the now buried Walbrook running between. Thus emerged London.

William Blake called the bricks of London “well-wrought affections” by which he meant that the turning of clay and chalk into the fabric of the streets was a civilising process which knit the city with its primeval past.

The Portland stone of the Customs House and St. Pancras Old Church has a diagonal bedding which reflects the currents of the ocean; there are ancient oyster shells within the texture of Mansion House and the British Museum. Seaweed can still be seen in the greyish marble of Waterloo Station, and the force of hurricanes may be detected in the “chatter-marked” stone of pedestrian subways. In the fabric of Waterloo Bridge, the bed of the Upper Jurassic Sea can also be observed.

Boswell suggested that “the intellectual man is struck with London as comprehending the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible.” It is the vision which was imparted to him as he was driven along the Haymarket in the early days of 1763: “I was full of rich imagination of London … such as I could not explain to most people, but which I strongly feel and am ravished with. My blood glows and my mind is agitated with felicity.”

As Ovid wrote in his Metamorphoses,
Even as I speak I see our destiny
The city of our sons and sons of sons,
Greater than any city we have known,
Or has been known or shall be known to men.

London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.

It cannot be conceived in its entirety but can be experienced only as a wilderness of alleys and passages, courts and thoroughfares, in which even the most experienced citizen may lose the way; it is curious, too, that this labyrinth is in a continual state of change and expansion.