In most of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, short stories, and essays published between 1929 and 1949, London never quite registers as the same city from one work to the next. Bowen’s representations of London across her oeuvre are best characterised by their unceasing transformations, ever-morphing geographies, atmospheric shifts, and cosmopolitan bearings. Before she moved to a terrace house on Regent’s Park in 1935 with her husband Alan Cameron, her fiction, like Bowen herself, was London-adjacent. It registers in some of her early work as a city that broadcasts the dull enticements of ancestral obligation. Ingénues in these novels adapt this habit; they gaze at London from afar through the combined lenses of a vivid, though vague, literary imagination and a sluggish cultural legacy, or they conceive of it as a launchpad for a career as an artist. After 1935, and especially after her experiences of London during the blitz, Bowen’s perceptions of the city transform from immobile scenes of social paralysis towards the blistering desire for new, enthralling, and sometimes strange associations.