Since you drown in London if you don't know what you want, you fairly quickly decide what your key objectives are, always remembering that you are too polite to mention them. Londoners concentrate on their destinations as though these precious certainties might vanish if they didn't.It is a bad city for lateral activities such as flirting, but a good city for highly focused activities, such as picking up. I love watching the professional people-watchers who are flown in from New York specifically to spend two hours trend-spotting in Old Compton Street and dictating reports into voice recorders: "spotted: blue anoraks - major trend; nine people with nose rings, four with green hair; tattoos particularly strong."everywhere rapidly. If you sit outside the Cafe Boheme on Old Compton Street, one moment a multi-pierced and tattooed pop-star will walk past, followed by someone who asks you for money for a cup of tea telling you that "credit cards are accepted".

There is not much piazza culture, but there's plenty of street activity, which involves hurrying past others to your destination, glancingDaniel Poole, designerIt's the unique street theatre. Therefore, London is a secret city - of clubs, societies, in-groups, street cults, telephone numbers Privacy is a London fetish. As outsiders, the centre is simpler for them; it's not clogged with memory.It all sits very uneasily together; only a certain reserve makes it possible at all. Folk from the European Union have free access; then there are the Middle Easterners, the New Russians, the South Americans.. it's terrific. Foreigners are more at home in central London than Londoners are.