As every visitor to London knows, Time Out is a weekly publication featuring a comprehensive listing of goings-on about town. Its orientation is very youth-trendy, but the listings are extensive enough that all kinds of people purchase it—it’s as good for finding out about what’s on at Wigmore Hall as it is for news on the latest fifteen-minute pop sensation. Every year Time Out supplements its weekly publication with a “London Visitor’s Guide.” Now, for many people, the editorial content of Time Outis negligible stuff. Nonetheless, from a sociological perspective, this editorial content, with its invocations of what’s hot and what’s not, has, I think, a real value. The principal editorial feature in the 2000–2001 “Vistor’s Guide” is a piece by Rhonda Carrier entitled “All Change?” One inevitably is first drawn to the call-out quotes in the loudly designed piece. “Londoners have had to wait for the dawn of a new millennium to kickstart a programme of projects both large and small that will change the face of the city forever.” The tone of “All Change?” is all excitement, telling of how London is new again, the capital of cool. The stodgy old architecture is finally being supplemented by ravishing new buildings, as the physical environment finally responds to the cutting-edge work of the 1990s Young British Artists. Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia” is not the marketers’ cliché that “Swinging London” was back in the sixties; it is, increasingly, a brick-and-mortar, steel-and-glass reality. London, in other words, is, or