Quotes About London

The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn't afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It

It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare—at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.

As late as the 1930s, almost half of London streets were still lit by gas.

In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London. Only the steady influx of ambitious provincials and Protestant refugees from the Continent kept the population growing—and grow it did, from fifty thousand in 1500 to four times that number by century's end.

In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records.

Visitors to eighteenth-century London often noted that the shops were open till ten at night, and clearly there would be no shops without shoppers.

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.

If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters.

These friends - and he laid his hand on some of the books - have been good friends to me, and for some years past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her. I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.

I am glad you found your way in here, for I am sure there is much that will interest you. These companions, and he laid his hand on some of the books, have been good friends to me and for some years past, ever since I had the good idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure.

I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.

It was a shock to me to turn from the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water, and to realise all the grim sternness of my own cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own desolate heart to endure it all.

Lascelles threw himself into the carriage, snorting with laughter and saying that he had never in his life heard of anything so ridiculous and comparing their snug drive through the London streets in Mr. Norrell's carriage to ancient French and Italian fables where fools set sail in milk-pails to fetch the moon's reflection from the bottom of a duckpond...

The walls were hung with a series of gigantic paintings in gilded frames of great complexity, all depicting the city of Venice, but the day was overcast, a cold stormy rain had set in, and Venice – that city built of equal parts of sunlit marble and sunlit sea – was drowned in a London gloom.

is expected to have certain peculiarities, but the most peculiar feature of Mr Norrell's house was, without a doubt, Childermass. In no other household in London was there any servant like him. One day he might be observed removing a dirty cup and wiping crumbs from a table like a common footman. The next day

Yet within Mr Norrell's dry little heart there was as lively an ambition to bring back magic to England as would satisfied even Mr Honeyfoot, and it was with the intention of bring that ambition to a long-postponed fulfilment that Mr Norrell now proposed to go to London.

Napoleon Buonaparte, it was said, was scouring France to find a magician of his own – but with no success. In London the Ministers were quite astonished to find that, for once, they had done something the Nation approved.

He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books.

Had it not been for Mr. Drawlight and Mr. Lascelles (benevolent souls!) the Town would have been starved of information of any sort, but they drove diligently about London making their appearance in a quite impossible number of drawing-rooms, morning-rooms, dining-rooms and card-rooms.

Reg: Furth's in London. And yes, I know, it's my fault. But as long as I'ver roused the lion, I was going to ask you to speak to him on my behalf. Alex: You wish me to speak to Furth. Reg: Well, yes. He's always like you. Just tell him what a noble, upright fellow I am, and how I have always upheld my position with dignity and respect. Alex: Lie, you mean. REg: Whatever it takes.

If he needed an answer about how much he'd changed, that provided it. He didn't want Fatima Hynes or any other nameless female with vacant eyes and an ample bosom. He didn't want anyone else, ever. He wanted Evelyn Marie Ruddick—and he'd be damned if he was going to let Neckcloth Alvington have her without a fight. And if there was one thing he knew how to do better than anyone else in London, it was how to fight dirty

You have business here?' the gruff voice asked. Rafe didn't relish the thought of a musket ball piercing his heart. His mother, and scads of London ladies, would be terribly upset.

Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.