© 1994

Like so many of the great cities of the world, London is many things to different people.

For those from abroad and tourists, it conveys images of tarnished royal splendours, faded imperial monuments, the tawdry glamour of Soho and Piccadilly Circus. For the more historically-minded amongst them, visions are conjured of Victorian fog and dread and square-shaped East End gangsters, while for others London is just a gentle panorama of terraced houses with tiled roofs and front gardens in suburbia.

For those who live there, London is alternately a quiet, often boring sprawl of a megalopolis with its myriad villages, parks and greenery, or in the grey light of day, a sordid capital where misery and poverty are inescapable.

While for lovers, London can be a graveyard of sweet memories.

For me, London, a city where I was born but did not return to until my mid-twenties, has a thousand varied faces: Hyde Park and the Serpentine, St Paul’s and the City on which I had to do a book during my publishing years, Camden Town and its increasingly bizarre markets, the hills of Hampstead, the genteel bohemia of Notting Hill and Islington, tennis at Wimbledon, the colour of the Thames near Richmond Bridge, football stadia in Tottenham and Highbury and cricket pitches at the Oval and Lord’s, the unending ascent of the Finchley Road where I had my first London flat, the late Scala cinema near King’s Cross, the West Indian accents in Brixton, pretty women in Clapham and Blackheath, Orthodox Jewish kids ambling down the Golders Green Road with their anachronistic locks, cavernous Victoria Station’s gateways to the South, and so much more.