The London-Machine.

London. Capital of England. Capital of Britain.
London.
Once the biggest city in the world, it sprawls sixty miles across and top to bottom, with a 'gravitational field' effect across huge swathes of Sothern England, turning entire counties into dormitories whose people wouldn't feel safe laying down their heads too close to the Capital.

London, that grandest of grand endeavours, the living, breathing organism of six million inhabitants, with everything needed to keep them alive.

Except, it's running out of water.
Except, the docks that launched it's people across the globe are mostly destroyed.
Except, the spirit of the pioneers has changed so that Red Ken's council spent 400 million (in 1980 money)on keeping the water out. Once every fifty to eighty years, that was.

And of course, the danger is getting worse. So they will have to start again.

Except, the fish market is a shed on waste ground, with no more connection to shipping, and the wrought iron Billingsgate is something else now.
Except, Covent Garden fruit and flower market has moved out many years ago, even though the population has declined, because it couldn't fit into Covent Garden any more.

Still, you know where to go if you want to see a clown.
A licensed clown, that is.

But this is still true; a walk through the streets of London exposes you to the forms and Earthly remains of greatness.

I don't know whether the London of Dickens was real in the 19th Century. I wasn't there. But I think it is real now.
Vast expanses of squalor greet the eye in every direction; whole neighbourhoods of spacious, dignified dwellings covering square miles, are, apart from a few super-rich enclaves, chopped up like corpses among savages, uncared for, shabby, practically falling down, impoverished, shuttered and poorly adapted into the dwellings of creatures that appear(I can't say 'thrive') and stay amongst the decay.
There is a banal uniformity in the houses converted to 'hotels' that struggle to be different.
All around is the death of joy, the lack of happy, bustling families living in bright, well-appointed and well-kept homes.

It is all the more miserable because for most areas (unlike, say, Brick Lane-bargain paradise), the poverty is voluntary and man-made.

It's like all the decent people have died, run away or otherwise disappeared, leaving behind life-forms who never cared enough to give up in the first place and whose sole attempt at the induction of guilt(by way of 'proving' they are still alive) is to feed off each other in a deadly-boring no-life no-death struggle, raising futility into an art form.

And of course, there are people who see even this world as an aspirational opportunity.

Outside the bolted doors, that stone-face the delights and horrors within to the world?
The hunting grounds of the urban savage.

And so concludes this lesson.
Apart from this message from the Mayor.
Sieg Heil baby.