No city in the world is better covered by literature – fictional and non-fictional – than London. From Pepys, via Dickens, to Ackroyd, London has benefited from a series of talented historians, novelists and commentators who have provided detailed accounts of the city’s condition. In the past few years a new tranche of books has been published on the contemporary character of the UK capital: with Anna Minton’s Big Capital, Rowan Moore’s Slow Burn City, Ben Judah’s This is London and Iain Sinclair’s The Last London notable examples. One thing that unites these otherwise excellent accounts is the conspicuous absence of discussions about the city’s visitor economy. This is a notable omission, given the scale and significance of tourism in London. Over the years, the city has earned various nicknames that purport to represent its essential nature: ‘the great wen’; ‘the big smoke’; ‘the city of villages’. But the epithet that perhaps best represents contemporary London might be: ‘the city of tourists’ or Destination London. ondon’s status as one of the world’s most visited destinations is not uni-versally welcomed. At the moment there is considerable media and academic attention dedicated to the problem of rapid tourism growth and what has become known as overtourism. This coverage has focused on various Euro-pean capitals: from Berlin to Barcelona, Ljubljana to Lisbon. Even though the UK’s capital city seems like the ideal case through which to explore the ways that destinations evolve and expand, there has been surprisingly little attention devoted to London in these debates.