Greetings, my friends.

I may have mentioned on a previous occasion that I rarely emerge from my cabinet these days (indeed, my last excursion of any length was a sojourn in St Albans, undertaken, for the sake of my health, in the early 1940s); but I am not unaware of the fabric of the metropolis in which I reside. In my time I journeyed as far as Krichev in White Russia, and was once dubbed by José del Valle of Guatemala, on account of my international interests, the ‘legislator of the world’ (‘international’, you will allow me to intervene at this point, is an inordinately useful word of my own coining)—yet for all that, my heart always remained in London, the city of my birth and much of my education, and my place of residence through virtually the entirety of my life.

It need hardly be said that the London which I knew was a very different place to that which exists today. It was, of course, smaller, with a population of rather less than one million towards the end of my lifetime, compared to over

eight millions today; and it covered a far more restricted geographical compass. Places such as Paddington and Kensington (in the latter of which, I understand, a sometime outpost of the University of London is now to be found) were to me scarcely more than hamlets in rural Middlesex. In the centre of town, whilst most of the names and alignments of the streets are not greatly changed from my day, so many are the buildings that have been torn down and replaced, that, were I to venture out, I have little confidence that I would be able to trace my steps around once-familiar haunts. Indeed, through the wonders of Google Street View, I find that the house of my erstwhile dentist, Samuel Cartwright, does still stand in Old Burlington Street: it is not, however, a building of which the sentimental associations rank highly in my memory, and I feel no great desire to revisit it. I further discover that a house in which I once briefly lodged at No. 2, Dover Street appears to have become what I believe you term a ‘nightclub’, rejoicing in the exotic name of Mahiki, and a popular haunt of certain junior members of the royal family. It appeals to me on none of these grounds.

I am quite sure that I would not recognise the smells of modern London: in my time the streets were filled with the stench of human and animal ordure, for which we had few effective means of disposal, and in that regard there have been great improvements, although I understand that parts of the sewage system constructed in the 1860s and 1870s now need to be replaced. I fear that there is also much to be done in these latter days to rid the atmosphere of the heady miasma of petrochemical emissions, a novel evil since my era.

Perhaps the one place that would be immediately familiar to me would be St James’s Park, in which I was wont, well into my eighth decade, to practise my daily circumgyrations for the physical refreshment of the body: I do not believe that that pleasant locale has changed greatly in two centuries.

Should any of my readers be planning an itinerary of London landmarks, I might encourage them to avail themselves of a stimulating leaflet entitled ‘A Bentham Walk’, which provides a route around some of the sites in the West End of London associated with my own life and posthumous commemoration: it is freely available, and may either be collected from a stand close by my Auto-Icon at UCL, or ‘downloaded’ (as I believe the expression is) from the Bentham Project website . I would particularly draw your attention to No. 6, Burlington Gardens (situated in Mayfair, to the rear of Burlington House). The building was constructed in the late 1860s to house the offices of the University of London, a role which it fulfilled to general satisfaction for thirty years, after which it was turned to other uses (it now serves some of the lesser functions of the Royal Academy of Arts). It is perhaps chiefly of interest, however, for the sequence of four statues carved by Mr Joseph Durham which grace the facade above the portico, symbolising the quadruple disciplines of Science, Arts, Medicine and Law, as represented in the persons of Newton, Milton, Harvey and, I must add in all modesty, Bentham.

I was interested recently to hear of a venture entitled MapTube London, an initiative undertaken by the ladies and gentlemen of the Centre for Advanced Spacial Analysis here at UCL, which purveys to allcomers a remarkable quantum of statistical information relating to the metropolis, presented in the form of cartographic displays. I was particularly intrigued to observe the mapping of the incidence of assorted categories of crime across London, revealing some unexpected hotbeds of criminal activity. Would that such data had been so readily available to me in my own quondam attempts at social analysis and reform! (Even in my latter years, the levelling and surveying of Great Britain, conducted under the auspices of the Board of Ordnance, and published on sheets at a scale of one inch to one mile, still extended across barely a third of the realm.) I wish this enterprise well, and trust that such dissemination of useful knowledge, implemented through the medium of the latest technology, may have untold benefits for the greater happiness of society at large.

Your ever laborious and devoted servant,

J.B.