London1994

Narrator:
He argued that the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities, a protestant fear of popery and socialism, the fear of Europe, that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society. He denounced the anachronisms of the City and its constitutional privileges.

Narrator:
For Londoners, London is obscured. Too thinly spread, too private for anyone to know. Its social life invisible, its government abolished, its institutions at the discretion of either monarchy or state or the City, where at the historic centre there nothing but a civic void, which fills and empties daily with armies of clerks and dealers, mostly citizens of other towns. The true identity of London, he said, is in its absence. As a city it no longer exists. In this alone it is truly modern. London was the first metropolis to disappear.