Culturally, socially and physically, it grows in and out of itself, and the suburbs, when you reach them, are not young.Other cities are ringed with suburbs of modern residential towers: London suburbs have mediaeval hearts with Tudor and 17th-century skeletons, 16th-century muscle, 19th-century flesh, 20th-century plastic surgery. It's a city of houses, and, because an Englishman's home is his castle, every house wants to be different and have a door directly onto the street. The result is bizarre conjunctions and chemical combinations - no uniformity at all Nothing coherent lasts in London for long. The one chance for a rational plan - Wren's, after the Great Fire - never took off, and London has continued to burgeon as a random heaven and hell. Where the hell...?London is the first and archetypal city as blind giant: the anonymous and unappeasable maw.

It is the most playful and eccentric mess, a phantasmagoria without visual or tribal cohesion.Not for nothing is it the capital of the pragmatic English, who always eschew the big picture. I was born here, went to school here, and have lived half my life here; then yesterday someone said they lived in Lower Clapton. London is always the great sea, a seething stew: formless, limitless, ever-changing, unknowable. Now it's very cosmopolitan; it's grown and changed and become much more fun, but it's also a place where you see a lot of street-drinking and many more damaged people than beforeYou can go up the Empire State Building, look down on the circumference of Manhattan, and say: "Yes, I could have this town in my hand." You may walk all round Paris in a day and feel: "Yes, this town could be mine." But such feelings can never arise in London, a city it is hardly possible to grasp, let alone possess.