London was where I grew up, and I lived half my adult life there.

It is almost twenty years since I moved away from the city, and a dozen years since I left England for Australia. As I started work on this chapter, despite that long separation, I found that the place still has a hold on me. My attempts to shape an argument about London kept being interrupted by unbidden recollections and apparently random associations. Then I got it. These distractions were bringing into focus the question I want to address. That is, where, and how, does London exist?

The premise of the present volume is that, as well as being a physical city in the bottom right-hand corner of England, 'London' also has an existence of some sort 'in literature' and, beyond literature, in a variety of other cultural forms. It exists as an archive-city, an immaterial London, built of words, images, and stories.

This other, archival London is the London constructed in literary texts from Chaucer, through Dickens, to Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith, and the London that I watch in movies. It is the London depicted in the images of Canaletto in the eighteenth century, Gustave Doré in the nineteenth century, or Christopher Nevinson and Gilbert and George at different ends of the twentieth century. It is the London reported daily on worldwide television news, or London as the dramatic backdrop for television fictions. It is also the London, observed and analysed, that I read about in academic monographs, sociological theorising, and government investigations.