The Great Wen

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The Great Wen is a disparaging nickname for London. The term was coined in the 1820s by William Cobbett, the radical pamphleteer and champion of rural England. Cobbett saw the rapidly growing city as a pathological swelling on the face of the nation. The term is quoted in his 1830 work Rural Rides: ('But, what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire?"').