Los Angeles Audio Tours

Forty-four settlers called Los Pobladores founded the town of Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles on the banks of the Los Angeles River on September 4, 1781. The Tongva people had been living in the basin for thousands of years before that. The Spanish came, then the Mexicans, then the Americans in 1848, and then in 1910 the movie companies arrived from the east coast and the city found its true calling. By 1921, more than eighty percent of the world's film production was concentrated here, and the place has been projecting versions of itself ever since.

The contradiction Los Angeles insists on is that it is genuinely 469 square miles of very different places trying to share a name.

Venice Beach runs its open-air circus of bodybuilders, street performers, and people watching each other watch people. Silver Lake hosts independent record stores and the kinds of coffee shops where the staff are all working on screenplays. East Los Angeles carries the deep roots of a Mexican-American community that was here before the city incorporated. Koreatown is the most densely populated neighbourhood in California. None of these places feel like the same city, which is both the problem and the pleasure of the place.