The City of London police have a specialist department tackling fraudsters nationally and internationally. They have identified 1,200 boiler rooms making criminals over £300 million per year. ibid.
Criminal gangs share the lists of people they have conned. ibid.
The sale of fake shares requires a sophisticated network. [George] Abrue’s criminal organisation uses bogus websites, shell offices, glossy brochures and mass-market emails. ibid.
The City of London Police have arrested nine people. They are accused of selling millions of pounds of fake shares to hundreds of British victims. Fraud Squad II, ITV 2011
Ringleader Abrue has been arrested in Sweden for assault. ibid.
Fraud is one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain. ibid.
Nine suspects are charged with sixteen offences. ibid.
73,634. Detectives have seized £1 million in assets from the gang. The victims have lost £20 million. ibid.
If we were to take London out of the statistics of Britain then it becomes a very different country. We’re taking some people from the very bottom out, and some people from the very top out. Professor Danny Dorling, re 2011 census
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of Life. Samuel Johnson
Sir, the noblest prospect that a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to London. Samuel Johnson
I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross. Samuel Johnson
Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this City, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists. Samuel Johnson
By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show. Samuel Johnson
Who’s from London? Give us a cheer. Quite a few. Quite a few. That’s probably the longest conversation you’ve had with a stranger, I should imagine. Jason Manford
But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens. William Shakespeare, Henry V V chorus
Oh, London is a fine town,
A very famous city,
Where all the streets are paved with gold,
And all the maidens pretty. George Coleman the younger, 1762-1836
But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster called ... ‘the metropolis of the empire’? William Cobbett, 1762-1835, English political reformer
London has many fine open spaces called Squares. The centres of these Squares are shut in by railings. Cesar de Saussure, Letters From London 1725-1730
I behold London
Human awful Wonder of God. William Blake, 1804
I wander thro’ each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear
in every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the chimney sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls;
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlots’ curse
Blasts the new-born infants’ tear
And blights with plague the marriage hearse. William Blake, Songs of Experience: London
Provided that the City of London remains, as it is at present, the clearing-house of the world, any other nation may be its workshop. Joseph Chamberlain
The blood of the just will commit a fault at London,
Burnt through lightning of twenty threes the six:
The ancient lady will fall from her high place,
Several of the same sect will be killed. Nostradamus II-51
When I am sad and weary,
When I think all hope has gone,
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on. Adrian Mitchell, ‘Celia, Celia’
Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children. Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater
A duller spectacle this earth of ours has not to show than a rainy Sunday in London. ibid.
England is a small island but London is illimitable: a brilliant windswept sunny day with the fountains like Haycocks of prismatic glitter in the shadow of Nelson’s Column. With the paving stones almost opalescent with colour everywhere. Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London, 1905
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
This is a London particular ... a fog, miss. ibid.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
The streets of London to be beheld in the very height of their glory should be seen on a dark, dull murky winter’s night when the heavy lazy mist which hangs over every object makes the gas-lamps look brighter and the brilliantly lighted shops more splendid from the contrast they present to the darkness around. Charles Dickens, 1836