In 1982, the American writer John Updike penned an immortal sentence about the pull of New York City: “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.” The very same thing can be said of Londoners. We may audibly agonise over pint prices, Tube strikes, phone snatchers and everything else we can possibly complain about, but we all know in our heart of hearts that there is truly no better place to be than London. Or, to quote a more homegrown talent, Samuel Johnson, “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
Granted, the affordability section of that clause is really being stretched to its limits in 2026, but his point remains the same. You could spend an entire lifetime eating, drinking, dancing and mooching your way around London, and there would still be a myriad stones left unturned. In celebration of this (and in response to the increasingly pervasive nature of pessimism about the capital), London entrepreneur Charlie Ward coined the term “Londonmaxxing”.
