London: Emerging global city of empire (1660-1851)

One icy walk across London on Christmas Eve 1992 encapsulates myambivalent relationship with this world city. I spent the academic year 1992-1993 in London researching my dissertation on crime and legal responsibil-ity in eighteenth-century England. My fiancé and I had been invited to dinner at the home of a college friend and his family who lived in Richmond. After dinner they prepared to attend midnight mass while we made our way to the train station where we were assured a ride into the city, though on Christmas Eve we had been warned that service would stop at midnight. We weren’t particularly worried, thinking naively that we’d be able to get a cab if no buses and trains were running in London. We caught the last train from Richmond that night, but it went only as far as Hammersmith-and we wanted to get back to my apartment in central London.