London: profile

What attracts millions of visitors to London is a potent mixture of continuity and tradition plus the excitement of never knowing what they’re going to find round the next corner.

London as a collection of villages

Henry James described the capital as a “giant animated encyclopaedia with people for pages”. With all its variety and history, it’s hard to know where to start as a tourist, but James’s emphasis is a good one. Even though the immensity of London makes it hard to embrace as a whole and you don’t find long-time residents proclaiming their feelings through “I heart London” stickers, the people and the culture matter as much as the buildings. To most residents, the city is a collection of communities or villages, once independent but long since swallowed up, along with much of the surrounding countryside, by the expanding metropolis.

London as an international city

London, it is sometimes said, is as unrepresentative of the United Kingdom as New York is of the United States. There’s some truth in this. Both cities have astonishingly cosmopolitan populations, their restaurants are almost as diverse as their immigrants, they are important centres of international finance, they pioneer the latest fashions, and their range of shops and theatres is absurdly disproportionate to their size.

But London is umbilically linked to the rest of Britain in some crucial respects. Unlike New York, it is a capital city, spawning governmental institutions. It is also an ancient city, dating back to Roman times. Foreign forces have not occupied it since the Normans arrived in 1066 and, although it was bombed during World War II, most of its iconic buildings survived.

As a result, it exudes a palpable sense of the nation’s history. You can walk in the footsteps of Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Churchill. You can journey along the Thames, as Henry VIII did. You can visit the room in the Tower of London where Sir Francis Drake lived out his last days. You can drink in the pubs where Dr Samuel Johnson drank in the 18th century or you can sit in the reading room where Karl Marx studied.