The recent slew of writers leaving the capital in disgust are deluded if they think it’s getting worse. For a transplant from north Wales, London has certainly seemed divisive and repellent at times – but also magnificent

Last year my daughter found a curious relic on the Thames shore near Shakespeare’s Globe. The object she plucked from the lapping waters was a red clay tile with a dog’s pawprint clearly embedded in it. One day long ago, this tile was lying out to dry and a pooch pranced across it. It may have been a medieval or even Romano-Celtic dog; the Museum of London has Roman tiles with pawprints just like this one. Whatever, whenever, it left more of a mark on London than most of us ever will. People have come and gone from this great metropolis in their millions, arriving and leaving, one way or another, generation upon generation, for so long. Most of our stories will vanish into the big history of the big city. At least this dog left a pawprint behind.

Another way to make your mark on London is to piss at it out of the car window as you leave.

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It is currently fashionable to announce one’s disgust with the place Daniel Defoe in the early 1700s labelled “the monster city”. It is even more fashionable to say this disgust has become terminal. The traffic in the Blackwall tunnel, the sneering City, the billionaires building gigantic basements, the insane value of small flats, the hordes of tourists, the traffic in the Blackwall tunnel – it is all so appalling that media commentators as well as, you know, ordinary people are loading up their vans and clearing out of town, with parting shots at a city that deserves to be put to sleep.

Yet the London obituarists’ words – and mine – will melt into the water, and not survive as long as that dog’s pawmark. For the latest wave of London critics in the press have been misled about their own originality by one of London’s most curious miracles, its ability to seem new. Modern London manages to make itself appear the brash youngster on the block compared with “old” European cities such as Paris or Rome. In reality it was Londinium once and has been a city for about 2,000 years. In that time, almost everything that can be said about a city has been said about London. We should have some humility before expressing a supposedly new view about it. This summer’s sod-you-London articles are just halfhearted scratches at one of English literature’s most festering sores.

William Blake in the Romantic age walked the streets of London and in every passing face discerned “marks of weakness, marks of woe”. TS Eliot in the early 20th century looked at the commuters crossing London Bridge and was reminded of the swirling hordes of the damned in Dante’s Inferno:

A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

This image of dead-eyed Londoners trudging to and from their City offices appears in the greatest modern literary work about London, Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922. Its title sums up the dark reputation of London in literature and art since at least the 18th century, when Jonathan Swift wrote a pungent poem about a city shower that sent meat, blood and “drowned puppies” swirling through the streets from the Smithfield butcheries to the Fleet ditch. William Hogarth’s painting The Rake in Bedlam, to take another great image of London, shows how this city can literally drive you mad.

Journalists and ex-Londoners complain that life in the capital today is getting worse. Let me tell you, it’s always been getting worse. And yet I love it. I hope never to leave. Perhaps one day they’ll find my pawprint in a tile.

To love London is to love all the things that seem to repel its critics. What puzzles me is how you could ever have lived in London without noticing its injustices and violence, ugliness and chaos – or to put it another way, its tension, noise, dirt, exuberant trashiness and raging unpredictable energy. This anti-London fashion, it seems me, posits a golden age that never existed. It’s a classic example of what the critic Robert Hughes called, with typical lack of tact, cultural bulimia. Having spent a couple of decades talking up London as a cool, cool city, the media are now sick on their own words and suddenly see all the bad things about this all too imperfect place.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Real lovers of London love instead the stench of time in its streets, the vast uncaring magnificence of its scale, the relentless abundance of its culture.’ Photograph: LatitudeStock/Alamy

Real lovers of London were never blind to the blemishes, and never bought into the flash rhetoric of “cool” London. We love instead the stench of time in its streets, the vast uncaring magnificence of its scale, the relentless abundance of its culture. All the great London recorders, from Dickens to Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, have dwelt in the dark cellars of London, not the glittering towers.

I have been raging at London as long as I have lived here; that is 16 years’ worth of wrath. This summer, for example, there’s building going on all around our flat. I get up every morning to the sound of pile drivers, hammers and clashing girders at the mammoth construction site across the road. If I am lucky, someone is also using a power saw in the flat above, which is being converted into a posher and more saleable residence. Then I head out to see some hugely overhyped and miserably executed exhibition in my job as an art critic. I gawp at the overrated art and pretentious curating. The press officer gives me an icy look, recalling my last review. Soon I am in a cafe, sipping awful coffee that manages to be both tasteless and bitter as I bash angrily at the keypad on a quaking iPad screen.

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Oh, how I relish it. What a great life. How lucky can anyone be? To live in London, slagging it off, is very heaven. And the life I lead would be impossible in any other British town or city. Good luck being a professional art critic in Birmingham, Cheltenham or, for that matter, Edinburgh or Glasgow. Yes, I know how privileged I am. Journalists who denounce the capital city of the English language should know it, too. Anyone who writes criticism, or works in art, theatre or anything else creative, has to acknowledge the incredible inspiration of the capital, in all its monstrousness. The quality that makes London infinitely stimulating is not lessened at all by rising property values or too many Mayfair restaurants. London always was hard, divisive and at times repellent.

In the days when the pundits were all praising London, when everything from the latest pop-up eatery to Frieze Art Fair was being touted as the Greatest Thing on Earth, I deluded myself that I loathed it. I didn’t see how deeply engaged I was with its foibles and follies. I certainly did not recognise the ultra-hip London of media myth with the place I actually dwelt. Then one day I suddenly found I was in love.

It was a summer Sunday in 2011. We were having a picnic on Primrose Hill – let’s not forget that the Smoke actually contains many of England’s loveliest green spaces – and I looked from the top of the hill across the urban skyline. There next to St Paul’s, dwarfing Wren’s lovely dome, was a colossal concrete pillar. It was the skeleton of the building soon to become the Shard. I was horrified by its ostentatious, aggressive scale and brutally destructive location in one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods. My shock has not diminished since it crystallised into its final form as an upside-down icicle of frozen money.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Shard ... brutally destructive. Photograph: Nick Edwards

The Shard symbolises everything people who’ve had it with the capital are running away from. It vaunts the ascendancy of runaway money that is driving up property prices, keeping bankers banking and filling Mayfair with art-buying plutocrats. I hate it. But why so much? Defenders can point to its designer Renzo Piano’s architectural excellence and the Shard’s realisation of the most ambitious designs of early 20th-century architects like Sant’Elia. Uh huh. If it was in a city I did not care about, I too might hymn its modernism. But the Shard is a stab in the heart of London, a grossly out of scale insult to a part of the city whose streets are haunted by bear pits, poets and playwrights. It makes a mockery of the older, organic, living fabric of this city. The Shard is chilling in its symmetry and purity. London is fascinating for its lack of order, its complexity, mess and variety. London is life. The Shard is death.

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The moment I felt the violence of the Shard’s attack on London was the moment I knew the city had me hooked. All this time railing against the flaws of the place, criticising its famous art scene – for a living – it had been sinking tendrils of belonging in me. Damn it, I care about London, its past and its future.

I think people who tire of London have become used to too narrow a portion of it. To put it bluntly, you may have become too sophisticated. If your London means talking about property prices at dinner parties, that must get fairly boring. But there’s so much more to this city than that.

I grew up in north Wales. The biggest city I regularly visited was Chester. London was a far-off, special place we visited rarely. My childhood London meant places like the Natural History Museum and Greenwich that I saw on brief, magical trips. Today my London means ... places like the Natural History Museum and Greenwich. As a parent you have a reason – an excuse? – to visit the places in London that are most innocent and beautiful, to look at dinosaurs in Kensington and tigers in Regent’s Park. If you are feeling exhausted by “adult” London, try the kids’ one. It’s great.

Or simply stroll the streets. You don’t have to follow Iain Sinclair’s method of urban psychogeography to feel the pulse of history, culture and science everywhere you go in London. In my immediate neighbourhood, there are blue plaques to Lenin, Jerome K Jerome and Kenneth Williams. It’s like a magical realist novel in which the Carry On star bemuses the architect of the Russian revolution with a camp remark. Time collapses, just going out to the shops. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, lived above my local paper shop, or rather in a building on the same site, with Percy Shelley.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gin Lane, 1751, by William Hogarth. Photograph: Barney Burstein/Burstein Collection/Corbis

Walk a bit further, past the British Museum – where I can see the Standard of Ur, the Elgin Marbles or the Rosetta Stone anyday I like, for free – and I come on a warm evening to St George’s Bloomsbury, a church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose bizarrely beautiful stepped steeple appears in William Hogarth’s print Gin Lane.

Here, where the buses choke New Oxford Street and chatty people make for the West End’s summer evening pubs, was once one of London’s direst slums. In Gin Lane, Hogarth depicts it as a place of tumbling houses, where people hang themselves in garrets, get so drunk they have to be carted about in wheelbarrows, and a gin-sodden pauper lets her baby fall from her arms into the abyss of London’s lack of charity.

Hogarth was angry at London, too. And he did something about it. If you walk east towards Lamb’s Conduit Street you’ll find the gates of the Foundling hospital, which Hogarth helped to found and fund. His portrait of its redcoated creator, Captain Coram, is in the former hospital’s small museum. People have always bemoaned the excesses of London. They have always tried to improve it, too.

When my daughter was a baby, we would come to Coram’s Fields, a playground now, to pet the goats. I used to think, seeing this London baby, about William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience – those visions of London. Innocence as well as evil exists in this city. All extremes are here. That’s what Dr Johnson meant when he said to tire of London is to tire of life.

Leave? No. I will stay and fight.