ABSTRACT
Travellers, London, will always be young, sprouting great gherkins of glass and London Eye, but have always already grown old: stone, ivy, fog pouring thick through Whitechapel alleyways haunted by Jack the Ripper. London could be made of words. From the diary of Samuel Pepys to the novels of Zadie Smith, London unfolds in words and phrases, and they unfold in London. Collective attention is gathered by cars and planes, then dispersed, and fractured back into a million pieces. But even fragmented and separated, Londoners walk on throughout the novel, on a single day at the end of the empire, united by hourly bells. London is the city where an actor playing Jacques first spoke Shakespeare’s words ‘All the World’s a Stage’; it is the city where such an insight was most obvious.
