Why London?

From Lavie Tidhar’s “some Notes Towards a Working Definition of Steampunk”:

Nicholls does go on to say that “it is as if, for a handful of SF writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one way or the other, a turning point peculiarly relevant to SF itself.” It could indeed be argued that, while not all Steampunk or Steampunk-influenced novels are set in Victorian London, the city, to a large extent, dominates these narratives: “a city,” Nicholls observes, where “the modern world was being born.”

But if steampunk is indeed a mulligan on the industrial revolution, a do-ocer to get all the cool toys we didn’t get in the real world (brass computers! armoured zeppelins! cogs on shoes!) as Kip Manley has it, than London surely is the wrong city to use. The industrial revolution happened up ‘orth, in the Midlands, in Lancastershire and Yorkshire, not in the capital, but in the grimy horrible industrial towns and cities Pete Wylie lists here.

Not that London didn’t have industry of course; just that the schwerpunkt of the industrial revolution was never there. Which makes the central role it plays in steampunk imagination all the more strange, until you realise most steampunk writers are as much influenced by Sherlock Holmes as real history. London fits the middle class conciets of steampunk, the desire to have an industrial revolution without the industrial classes. In that regard, London was indeed the city where the future was being born.