One of the books I keep returning to from university reading lists is Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In it a fictional Marco Polo spins tales of all the cities one could ever dream of to the great Kublai Khan.

Thin cities, cities and desire, cities and the dead, cities and memory, continuous cites, cities and signs… and all the while Polo is speaking about just one city, Venice, revealing it to Kublai Khan from a thousand different viewpoints. It never fails to bring a new dimension to my understanding of cities, and how people live in them.

Perhaps it is being in isolation for so long but browsing through the book the other day I couldn’t help but think how much my experience of London now feels like these brief glimpses through other people’s stories.

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