The Spirit of London

I'm something of an animist.
I believe that everything has an innate spirit, or at least the potential for one.
Rocks, trees, the sun, animals, thunder, snow, pocket fluff.
Everything.

The city.

Genius loci, a spirit of a place; built up in layers of accreted emotion, intelligence, experience. Everything that happens in a place, happens to it, to some extent. And just as each of us in the sum of our experiences, so London is the sum of its own.

And the Spirit of London is rather more formidable than most local gods; it is creative, twisted, complex, savage, benevolant, malefic, impulsive, fucked up, and very, very old.

London creates things. It builds itself and tells stories using the hands and minds of those who live with and within it.
And it can make those stories real.

It's possible to read the city's mood and inclination, to catch glimpses of its dreams and fears; and they are not always the same as those of its populance.

London dreams vast, slow dreams, and sometimes we are caught up in in them.

At the edges.