By D.K
“BUT, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, the metropolis of the empire?” So asked William Cobbett, a radical journalist in the 1820s. Two centuries later his term for London, the “Great Wen”, has stuck with us. The view that London, far from being a glittering metropolis, is in fact the source of provincial Britain’s woes, is as fashionable as ever.
