Y'know why London's so cool? You're walking past an ugly modern office/studio-type building in Soho and you see a sign on the front in large letters that reads (garbled through my memory filter): "William Blake was born in 17XX on a house that once stood on this site." Writers, murderers, musicians, thousand-year-old abbeys, centuries-old pubs, gothic cemeteries, the Thames, Roman walls, palaces, Whitechapel, Baker Street, it all happened here. Blows my flippin mind.