London living... take three

I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Your own exploration therefore has to be personalised; you're doing it for yourself, increasing your own store of particular knowledge, walking your own eccentric version of the city.

Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.

Samantha Shannon

This is life, in all its gruesome, lovely, neon-lit glory.

Nuala Casey, Soho, 4am

This city had been a city for two thousand years, and I could feel that with every step I took. Bits of all that time were still here, alive, even if it was just in the form of collective memory.

Carrie Vaughn

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

Anna Quindlen, Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City