"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 writers 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

Blackfriar's Bridge in 1896

Petticoat Lane in 1903

A rather amazing and nearly crystal-clear color motion picture of London in 1927.

A magic camera's futuristic visions on London in 1924

The Blitz, 1941

The victory celebrations of 1945

"Of all the seats in all theaters in the world, the best seat is at the front of the top of a London omnibus." -- Henry James

Driving the A13

A cruise on the Thames, 1983

The haunted London Underground