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. It was always so - England is the champion mongrel - but never more so than now The British Empire has imploded to its hub. It is the Mecca of individualism, a colossal do-it-yourself kit supplying all the components for assembling any life you wish. Though England has a control culture and is less free than some nations, in London, nothing is unavailable - only the methods of acquisition are controlled This is our famous hypocrisy.

But London's stability in this respect accounts for much of its success and its ever-growing cosmopolitanism.London is now the most cosmopolitan city in the world by far. Nobody wants to go to New York any more, it's just geekville, but foreign communities are still arriving and setting up here. And who says size isn't important? You live in Hampstead, your best friend is in Dulwich? - forget it.Yet unlike Paris (snobbery), Rome (carnival), New York (money), Moscow (look over your shoulder), or Tokyo (robotism), London imposes no particular lifestyle upon its inhabitants. London and Londoners wage an unceasing battle against disintegration. Stepney, Poplar and Limehouse are fabulously atmospheric names, but they endure only on the map: as places, they have collapsed into the black hole of nowhere, with scarcely a pre-war building between them and with modern ones of dreadful monotony They are unknowable because they do not exist. This is a measure of confidence, as well as of stupidity; and of necessity, too.