Living
Living now in London is now better than it ever has been both for the rich and the poor, with poverty extremes being almost non existent. Even so there are still probably some 50,000 people sleeping rough on the London streets every night. Ethnic minorities sleeping rough are in the minority.

Planners have tried to re-create small village areas within London to enhance the environment for those who live in the centre very often by establishing traffic free (or traffic restricted) zones supported by local shops and pubs but no new churches. Indeed based on the numbers of people who now go to church, London and elsewhere in England is a secular society. Two good examples of new village areas are in Holborn, north of Theobald's road and north of Oxford street and east of Baker street. These should be added to the fashionable village areas of Kensington and Notting Hill as well as the less fashionable, but swinging Bayswater and Camden. (There are many more examples)

Transport
What is the solution to the mass movement of people in a city? Bikes perhaps!! Yes even in cold wet London the use of pedal power made a come back some 10 years ago on the backs of a general revival, fuelled by fashionable, off road mountain bikes. A bike is probably the best, safety excepted, for the young to travel up to say 10 miles in the metropolis. Unfortunately bike lanes are few and far between and theft is an issue particularly of desirable £500 plus bikes.

The Tube (Metro) in London is extensive but is mainly over 100 years old and is very slow and crowded. A solution would be to rebuild on new tracks through existing tunnels. This has been done to some extent on the Northern Line which boasts new rolling stock and on the Jubilee Line which was extended out to Greenwich via the old Surrey Docks for the Millennium Dome exhibition. The left wing Mayor, Ken Livingstone should be given credit for fighting Central Government to achieve a unified management structure, with clear accountability, to run London's Tube Trains. Unfortunately, however, no radical plans have been produced to say double the potential capacity of the service as might be possible with a radical increase of the speed of the rolling stock.

Population and Housing
There are no plans to further reduce the population of London. Indeed the numbers of people living in central London is on the increase particularly amongst the better off as the urban village environments and other schemes start to work. The use of high rise developments for high class living is virtually nil other than in the Docklands. The poor also prefer terraced-style housing of which there is plenty and indeed poor inhabitants living in the high-rises that have been built sometimes have to stomach dirty and violent surroundings. Major international companies on the other hand, like inhabiting high rise office blocks and London Mayor Ken Livingstone is working with architects to determine the best areas in London for office Sky Scrapers. The opposition is the English National Heritage.

London peoples are multi-cultured and multi-coloured. On the fringes there is full integration with inter-marriages particularly where religion is not an issue. In the main however the new races keep to invisibly separated territories and happily meet in the central shopping precincts and in the workplace. The big boost to workplace integration came with the advent of the computer which required a new breed of intelligence to write software code that could therefore be satisfied by any social class, colour, religion or sex. Indeed in the computer world there are no obvious top dogs between men and women, rich or poor, whites, blacks, browns, Chinese or Japanese, Christians, Muslims or any other group. This might be the start of something good! London has its fair share of software companies to further this integration.
Walking the streets of London it is also very encouraging to see many slim, well dressed, healthy and attractive people from all races mingling with equality of opportunity round every corner. (Obviously there are exceptions to this generalisation notably amongst the poorly educated inner city inhabitants. Whose fault is it, their parents or the government?)

Shopping
One of the attractions to London is shopping. Top shops, in for example Oxford Street (Selfridges and Marks and Spencer), Regents Street (Hamleys, Libertys and Lillywhites), Piccadilly(Hatchards), Knightsbridge(Harrods) are a match for any shop in any country in the world. This is of course only a small sample of the best known shops and there are a multitude of smaller specialist shops catering for every need of men and women. All these are central in the West End and easily and cheaply reached by Tube, Taxi, Bus, Bike or on foot.

Theatre
London is perhaps the best in the world for live plays as the English repertory companies are known to give the best training for this art. Theatre Land is centred round Shaftsbury Avenue which runs north east out of Piccadilly. There are small Theatres to be found all over London which include of course the rebuilt Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in historic Southwark and the Young Vic south of Waterloo Bridge.

The best views --- from The London Eye --- The largest of its type in the world.
Plan your trip from there.