Governing a future London: the city of any dreams?

To be a Londoner is always to take a chance: an instinct that manifests itself, materially, by an enormous addiction to lottery that makes Londoners the chief per capita financial gamblers in the world, and which proves itself, at more significant levels, by their perpetual willingness to take the most improbable human risks. And I believe the spirit of the ugly old indifferent capital encourages the presence of such people; and by its very incoherent informality, enables them to discover one another more freely and happily than elsewhere in our land. (MacInnes, 1962)