London is my home… I know what’s right and wrong here, and it’s nice to have somewhere familiar to go back to.
I have been interested in fashion since I was a kid. Then I lived in London, where it was more about costume and a personal statement of who you are than about fashion.
In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.
Everyone remembers where they were on 7 July 2005 when four deadly bombs ripped through the heart of London.
From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.
I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
If I died snowboarding, you could honestly tell everybody in the world that Jeremy London died happy.
Of course there are times when I hate London, but equally there are times when I can walk ’round a corner and I really feel that this is my place.
I got the call to play Tony Manero in ‘Saturday Night Fever’ in Madrid, a role I’d always wanted, as it’s such a well-constructed show, and my background is in musical theatre. I’d been travelling back and forth between London and Spain for auditions and had been borrowing money from friends to do it.
London was a really multi-racial city … It’s incredible how comfortable people are with race there.
When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore.
The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles.
Why is the rest of the world so overcrowded? Nobody lives in America! We’re all squashed up on top of each other in London.
Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn’t actually done much about it until I came to London.
On close inspection, this device turned out to be a funereal juke box – the result of mixing Lloyd’s of London with the principle of the chewing gum dispenser.
Many of my favourite hotels are in London. I like the Covent Garden Hotel and I stayed at Blakes last time I was in London. I like the feeling of warmth and homeliness that you get from both of those places.
Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that’s posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can’t take it any more is different.
This is what I wanted. They tell me that London is the best field in history. I wanted to be part of that. Because everyone will be there it will be a wonderful challenge for me. You can see the best runners, how they look, how they run. For me to beat the best is what counts.
I didn’t really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.
I could go to London in 2012. I will only be 37.
When I did it, I was a starving musician in London in a basement flat, but a simple tune with the right singer or the right situation can become very well liked and accepted. I’m only too pleased to say it happened with that one.
If you live in London, where politicians and media commentators spend most of their time, you are spoilt for transport choices – trains, an extensive underground network and a regular bus service.
People have always assumed that I am privileged. And that has been a problem sometimes. When I first started modelling, and I was schlepping around London with no money, I found it rather irksome that people thought I had a private income when I didn’t.
London is a roost for every bird.
Although I’m not from London originally: I moved down here when I was 16, so it’s played a part in my life. It’s where I’ve lived for all that time.
As a child, I wanted only two things – to be left alone to read my library books, and to get away from my provincial hometown and go to London to be a writer. And I always knew that when I got there, I wanted to make loads of money.
It came as a great shock to me when I heard that England and Soviet Russia had become allies. So much so that I thought that the people responsible in London were acting in a manner that no longer coincided with British imperial interests.
It’s nice to have some continuity you can come back to. I feel that in coming home, coming back to London.
In some of the great cities of Europe – Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels – tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.
I used to stay up all night playing ‘Resident Evil 2,’ and it wouldn’t stop until the sun came up. Then I’d walk outside at dawn’s first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I’d stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.
When my first novel was published, I went in great excitement round bookshops in central London to see if they had stocked it.
New York City has fantastic restaurants and, unlike London, a lot of the best restaurants are relatively cheap.
I’ve always wanted to perform on the London stage.
I grew up in London, a city devastated by the bombing. I am, you might say, a Blitz Baby.
There’s this idea that it has to be made in London. But we’ve got everything up here, and if you’ve got comics who are gifted because of where they’re from, you shouldn’t drag them away from that natural resource.
I didn’t know we’d been tagged as posh. I went to a state school in London, so maybe people think I have a posh voice and that’s where it comes from?
My relationship with the Philharmonia Orchestra brought me many times to London and I will always reflect positively on that early period of development with them – their patience, their warmth, their dedication.
The objective is to do things well in London.
Even in this globalised world, London is still the standard for our times. The city has embraced the world’s diversity and represents the finest in human achievements.
When I’m in London, I love to visit Kensington gardens and just sit in the park and read a good book.
I’m used to being around kids. Even when I was growing up in London, I had an older sister, I had a younger sister that I used to look after from time to time.
The great thing about this is, and not to pump my own tires, but I feel like I’m not maximized yet. I feel like I can still run faster, jump higher, which I think makes it special. Hopefully, going to London, I’ll be welcomed into the decathlon community.
When I was studying in London, I worked part-time as a waitress. I was teaching drama to kids. I did a lot of odd jobs to pay for my studies.
My dream has always been to live somewhere in London where the chimneys look as if they could have been used in ‘Mary Poppins.’
London in the ’70s was a pretty catastrophic dump, I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble; we had severe energy problems; we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities; politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.
In London it’s easy not to be the focus of attention, especially when Sting lives in the house just behind you.
During our stay in London for the first time I was able to establish personal contact with some of the organic chemists, whose work I knew and admired from the literature. I found them most gracious and helpful.
I’ll never forget when we played Shepherd’s Bush in London. We played ‘I Run To You’, and we put the mic out for the last chorus, and you could hear them singing the chorus with the beautiful accent that they have.
Yeah, I’m from North Carolina, but grew up in Eastern Europe, and became a woman in London.
If you erased New York, I hate to say it, if you erased Frankfurt, even London, the world would not have changed.
It’s a unique situation as well because England is a small country, so it makes it easy for the fans to travel. If we play down in London, they get buses and we’ll get three or four thousand fans come down. They’ll all sit in the same area and show their support for the team.
You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn’t fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can’t even speak the same language?
I have studios in the different places where I live – in Ibiza, Paris and London – but they’re not crazy studios, they’re just rooms with good monitors, and all I do is plug my laptop in. It’s a different way to make music, but for me, I love it, because it’s more connected to the world.
I showed my dad the first episode of ‘Toast of London’ the other night. He laughed a bit, but when it finished, he just turned to me and said, ‘You’re an idiot.’ I loved that.
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There’s hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London’s texture.
I’m incredibly boring; I had a very happy childhood. I never starved, nor did I have a silver spoon in my mouth. I’m one of those terribly middle-of-the-road, British middle class, South London gents.
