The London of the past decade felt stable. Why else had the Russian billionaires come here to buy football clubs and newspapers? Why else did the Saudis descend on Knightsbridge? The equation seemed to be working — until suddenly it wasn’t. The riots last summer didn’t so much spread from one neighborhood to the next; they blossomed in disparate parts of the city. Older conservatives blamed the youth; the youth blamed other youth. It was always someone else, but the people in the grainy YouTube videos weren’t invaders at all.

“I certainly didn’t expect this in London,” said Nick Smith, a television executive. During the riots, he stepped off a bus in South London and saw 15 people rattling the metal shutters of a Foot Locker. “The people I saw, they didn’t come from another country. They were the people who would, on any other day, be sitting next to me on the bus. They were smashing up shops.”

“You can’t cut the defiance out of London,” a university student said at a pub near the Strand, where protesters had stacked placards near the door during another of the recent protests against higher tuition fees. “There are people in London here who look at Beijing with great envy. To be able to call in the tanks, to be able to push people around. ‘Oh, the things we could do if we never had to worry about the streets.’ As if that was not the most important thing about this place. As if London was anything other than a place of defiance, a staging ground.”

But London’s uneasy alchemy is also what gives the city its propulsion. “The Games will be fine, and there’ll be a lovely opening ceremony, and there’ll be a lovely closing ceremony,” a theater director told me at a cafe in Holborn when I asked her about the Olympics. “Some things will work and plenty of things won’t work, and somehow that combination of the working and not working is what gives it a particular energy and a particular life. If everything worked, it would be like Canberra. It would be dead in the water. And if nothing worked, it would be a third-world country, like Haiti. But this combination of not being able to get everything to work that we say will work seems to (make London) more appealing, perhaps, than a well-run, efficient city.

“I mean, if you’re always striving for success, you end up with something like America, and nobody,” she said, smiling, “wants to be like America, really.”