The site has earned a substantial following for an arty endeavor with a mere monthly­ update. By the end of the year, more than 30,000 people will have visited, and Artangel, the internationally renowned art organization that commissioned the project, intends to publish a book based on the site in early 2007. Time Out London named it a Website of the Week; the Daily Telegraph and Radio 3 are serializing the project; and Sandhu receives countless invitations to speak and to participate in various TV, radio, and documentary projects. There's even talk of turning it into a kind of opera in Sweden in 2008.

"I wait as impatiently as a child promised a birthday treat for each episode to be published," says Christopher Cook, critic and cultural historian for BBC Radio. "What it's captured wonderfully so far is the true Urban Other, the city that lives at night - a kind of distorted mirror image of the city that's bathed in shadows. What he's searching for is the contemporary equivalent of film noir, so there's a deeply romantic feel to the work."

For Sandhu, London's history makes its nights different than any other city's. "Gaslight London, for good or for bad, was always a thing of great fascination to travelers," he says. "Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Fu Manchu - these real and fictional characters were magnets for tourists as early as the 1880s." The city's structure also plays a role, and Sandhu considers his home more of a collection of microvillages than a unified capital. "The alleyways and small streets are easy to get lost in. They seem like traps - especially at nighttime," he says. "So the city's topography, combined with its ancientness - the ghosts of great plagues, fires, and wars that have all flared up here - give nighttime a particular gravity and weight. So does the fact that transport is so terrible and expensive. It means that the nocturnal city still hasn't been colonized by the pleasure principle to the extent that it has been in New York, Sydney, and many European cities."