The city is alive.

I recently had the good fortune to spend a night in London. Living in the Midlands, London is distant enough to me to feel like it may as well be another country. I know it’s down there, and I know as far as most of the world is concerned, it’s the only part of this country that counts. Sometimes I feel like I’m the equivalent of an inbred farmer in the sticks, considering himself almost a different species to these fancy city folk. The sensible part of me knows that cities are full of people not that different to me; the difference being that there are more of them; something you’d think would put me off, but for some reason doesn’t.

We got there by train – first to London Euston, then Underground, then another short train journey into Croydon. The thing that strikes me about London, is the sheer numbers of people, all different and no doubt complex, yet all specks besides the city as a whole, like stars in a galaxy. We got to our platform in the Underground, only to find our train was jam-packed. As I was preparing to force myself into this mass of bodies, my travelling companion, with the benefit of more experience in this, placed a hand on my shoulder and motioned me to wait and let the train go. I then learned that there was another train coming along in a mere 90 seconds. And another 2 minutes after that. On and on, day and night. The number of people constantly moving in, out, through and under the city is mind boggling. The roads are almost never free of buses – usually there are 2 or 3. To use a car to get around London seems ludicrously inefficient.

Endless movement, endless offices, endless new buildings going up, endless restaurants, apartments, banks and hotels, endless people. It adds up to something that while made up of these separate parts, feels somehow beautifully alive in its own right, and I love that about it.

It makes me want to tour cities everywhere, to see how each melting pot of humanity feels, to see if they are different. It’s why I’m drawn to fiction where a city becomes a character in its own right, like Ankh-Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, or New Crobuzon in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station.

Cities are alive, and, while certainly bad for the environment, the wealth of positive inspiration I get from them manages to quiet the concerned ecologist in me.