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This is not by chance. We have seen Anglo Saxon reluctance to recognize the city either as an entity or as an idea. London is the kind of city you get if you believe in neither of those things.

We in England (and I say England because the Scots are better at cities than we are) are not really convinced that a city is a "thing", indeed that it is anything more than an agglomeration of building. But, OK, we may not have been very good planners but in London we live in the most startlingly anarchic spread of bricks and mortar ever seen. A city of Ideas, principles? they may have been missing; but sheer blind kinetics there always were.
Cruikshank's exciting picture of London Going Out of Town shows this process. Trees and haystacks flee before the march of hods and ladders and pickaxes; a wonderfully futuristic image. Through the smoke the dome of St. Paul's is just visible. I know we are meant to think, oh, how terrible! But I can only feel excitement at the routing of Nature.

The blind centrifugal force of London is exciting; perhaps I should just resign myself to it. Incoherent it is on many levels, historically complex, departing as it did from two centres (at least), Westminster and the City, catching and digesting in its web villages and towns, its progress colliding with, lapping around, absorbing or demolishing previous settlements and villages. During the centuries London has been a heaving mass of forces elbowing for space, almost a geological phenomenon, with inevitable impactions. Economically it has been the anarchic buccaneering spirit of capitalism itself; it is the city of capitalism; and capitalism, for all its virtues, is never going to be a very pretty sight; an impressive sight but not a pretty one.

But we must embrace London as it has become; love it in spite of its iredeemable ugliness, see the virtues and essential London-ness of some very alarming things indeed!

The building of the sixties and seventies has needed twenty or thirty years to begin to look right, very right; suddenly I am regarding the grey concrete building of the seventies and thinking brilliant, utterly and absolutely right for London in their uncompromising audacity: Guy's Hospital with that lowering overhang at its summit; the Barbican; stunning towers with their mega-Sienese, fortifications 60 storeys in the air! the South Bank unexpectedly looking good after so long; yes there are some terrible terrible things; the Elephant and Castle complex is thoroughly nasty; but, yet again, even it has an undeniably epic terribilita. There are some thrilling tower blocks throughout the city, particularly in south London, great ramparts in the sky. What I like about the buildings is that they are thoroughly in the buccaneering and audacious London tradition.

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