On January 1, 1672, the philosopher Robert Hooke offers his new year hangover cure: hot tea and beetroot juice spiked with a clove of garlic. In an entry for January 8, 1608, the great letter writer John Chamberlain reports that the Thames has frozen over, that gallons of mulled wine can be bought on the ice and that an otherwise honest women had suddenly been taken with a great desire to have her husband get her pregnant on the river.

In January 1801, Charles Lamb was perturbed by the "bustle of wickedness round about Covent Garden" and longed to return to the Lake District. The fashion designer Ossie Clark wrote of his fondness for "nocturnal walks" on Hampstead Heath in 1990. 

The last word on London goes to the diarist Helen G. McKenny who wrote in 1887: "Went to Highgate to spend the evening. The suburbs! Oh, how dead they seem! We wonder, Jack and I, how we ever could have lived in them! Give us the City with its pulsating life, its need, its misery even, rather than the self-indulgent calm of suburban life!"