There is a particular pleasure in leaving London from behind the wheel of something extraordinary — the kind that the city itself seems to acknowledge. Pull away from The Connaught on Carlos Place, where the doormen have seen every significant motorcar of the last century, and you are already inside a different register of the city. West along Piccadilly, the architecture holds its breath. Then The Mall opens up — processional, arrow-straight, flanked by plane trees that frame Buckingham Palace like a stage set designed for exactly this moment. This is not sightseeing. This is a city handing you its most ceremonial artery and asking what you will do with it. Hyde Park Corner arrives with a sudden widening of possibility. The M4 is minutes away, and beyond it, the Cotswolds, Wales, the Atlantic edge. Westminster does not try to detain you — it understands that the right car deserves open tarmac. The city's gravity is the point of departure, not the destination. What you carry with you is the weight of that address, that boulevard, that hotel, and the particular confidence of having begun somewhere that does not do anything by half measure.