When a man is tired of London, he is tired of gits quoting Samuel Johnson at him.

No excuse for having a go at the canvas, mind you.

You'll all be familiar with Flickr by now, and its splendid tag facility, the potential for misuse of which is enormous. Take 'London' for instance. Here you'll find pictures of Nelson's Column and Bayswater, Bloomsbury and Marble Arch. You'll also find pictures of Stonehenge, Princes Street in Edinburgh, the Eiffel Tower, the interior of a Prague hostess bar, and several pages' worth of the long stay parking area at Washington Dulles. Because people don't tag their snaps for other people, they tag them for themselves, and relevance and association are highly subjective concepts.

On the other hand, it's also disturbing when the subject is more tightly defined. Of those photos that fit the GLA boundary, an overwhelming percentage seem to be from a tiny oval shaped area stretching from the Wheel to Buckingham Palace, as if most visitors had only two hours in town before leaving again. The sheer profusion of views of Westminster Abbey is especially perplexing - most English religious architecture manages to make the ornate seem dull, but WA does it in a way that is actually exhausting to the eye.

Perhaps we just don't have much to take photos of here? I may be biased, because I have had plenty of time to have had it up to here with here, but some of our most renowned public spaces really aren't up to much.

One of our more architecturally underwhelming buildings, Buckingham Palace is more of a house. A dull one at that. In the style of a Town Hall in a West Country spa town, but pointlessly elongated. In summer there are tours - I've never been in but I'm told it's filled with a horrible quantity of tacky gilt.

Piccadilly Circus: there are postcards of this road junction from the 1950s in which the neon ads look picturesque, but now the buildings are clad in mediocre fascias evoking a suburban shopping parade on steroids. Even the smackheads and rent boys have forsaken the place. This vortex of human and vehicular traffic obstructs passage from St. James to Soho to the extent that one is tempted to take the 38 one stop just to cross it. Walk down Coventry Street and past the effluent Trocadero and you find...

Leicester Square. Several obscenely overpriced cinemas, streams of adolescents from zones 4 to 6, indefatigable little fellows trying to sell single roses to couples who have already shagged. On weekend evenings, a place where people from Brentwood and Carshalton can meet and kick each other senseless. We do vertical drinking on the pavements outside pubs very well, but otherwise al fresco urban social culture is beyond us. We should give up and Fester Square shows why. La Rambla it's not.

When I lived in Fitzrovia I'd occasionally be asked by visitors for directions to Oxford Street - when we were already on it. I can only sympathise. If Canal Street ever got as bad as Soho's (oursnotyours) northern boundary, it would lose even its PATH-borne custom. Was ever thus: in 1964 Len Deighton wrote 'Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it' (Funeral in Berlin). When even spy novels are hitting something with near-Wildean putdowns you know it's low.

Covent Garden: as Time Out will tell you, London is all about shopping, buying things, etc (that and watching telly). The Parisians learned their lesson with Les Halles and so have we - it's when you chuck out the fruit and veg market that the rot sets in. WC2 sucks in the creatures from Burbworld like a big Electrolux that's just had its dust-bag changed. Put a roof on it and most of Covent Garden would be more obvious as the shopping centre it merely is. Or mall. Pronounced 'maul'.

On the other hand, London looks good from the air. It really does. Do yourself a favour when you're next flying in to Heathrow (which, as overcrowded, prone to baggage loss, and grim as it is, is not Gatwick in Sussex, Luton in Bedfordshire or Stansted almost in the Fens) - use the 'change seat' facility to be over on the right hand side of the plane. If your boss isn't paying sit way back (it's not as if you'll beat your luggage to the carousel) so the wing isn't in the way. Usually the plane will enter London from the north and make a sharp right turn over the City, so that your view is exactly aligned downwards with the Bank junction, pivoting around it. Time your arrival for dusk and it will be lit prettily, the bridges like Christmas trees, the parks as dark voids in between. With all the lights on even Hounslow High Street looks like a valley of jewels and precious metal. Try not to dwell on the fact that you're not going to be at your hotel for at least another hour and a half. Even if it is at the country end of the Cromwell Road.