In those vanished days of October 1962, not even the biggest Bond fan could have imagined that 50 years later the capital would be gearing up for yet another big-budget adventure with Britain's most celebrated secret agent.
Yet with the new Bond film, Skyfall, going on general release at the end of this week, our love affair with 007 seems as intense as ever. Indeed, despite all the social and technological changes of the past half-century, the man himself appears uniquely ageless.
True, he now works for a feisty woman from a hi-tech riverside HQ. But he has never lost his appetite for a punch-up, a pithy witticism or a pouting beauty. Even his trademark vodka martinis remain defiantly shaken, not stirred.
Beneath the surface, though, the Bond formula has quietly changed over the years. Indeed, one of the unusual things about Skyfall is that so much of it is set in London, from Bond's meetings with Q and M to a thrilling chase through the streets and a dramatic clash with Javier Bardem's peroxide villain on the Tube.
In many ways the London setting makes perfect sense. After all, thanks to Daniel Craig's splendidly deadpan turn alongside the Queen in this summer's Olympic opening ceremony, Bond and London are now inextricably linked in the public imagination.
Indeed, after a year in which the Games reintroduced London to the world as a supremely modern, exciting and self-confident city, it feels absolutely right that it should end with millions around the world watching a typically British hero battling international criminals inside Temple Tube station.
Yet one of the odd things about the Bond series is how little it has used our nation's capital. In fact, with the exception of the obligatory briefing with M — usually filmed on a generic studio set — British cinema's greatest hero seems to have spent as little time in London as possible.
In Ian Fleming's original stories, James Bond is the son of a Scottish father and a Swiss mother, grows up in the Alps and spends most of his schooldays at the Scottish boarding school Fettes, famously Tony Blair's alma mater. Admittedly, Bond owns a flat off the King's Road, maintained by an inevitably Scottish housekeeper, but since he spends so little time there, you wonder why he bothers paying the mortgage.
In this as so much else, 007 was merely reflecting his creator's prejudices. As an unapologetic reactionary, Fleming hated post-war Britain and spent as much time as possible in Jamaica.
In the books, therefore, Bond is never happier than when flying off to the Caribbean. And when we do see him in the capital, he is dining with M at Blades — a little enclave of Victorian England in the heart of St James's, based on Fleming's club Boodle's.
By the autumn of 1962, when Bond made it onto the screen, London was on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties. Indeed, the premiere of Dr No took place on the same day the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do.
Yet Sean Connery's Bond cut a more conservative figure than we often remember. We rarely glimpsed him in Sixties London; we never saw him strolling down Carnaby Street with Miss Moneypenny, pursuing a villain past the boutiques on the King's Road or queuing for tickets at Camden's Roundhouse.
Like his literary avatar, he was more comfortable snorkelling in the Bahamas or playing baccarat in Monte Carlo. And certainly he would never have fitted into the youth scene of the day.
After all, as he tells his lover in the opening moments of Goldfinger: "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"
In the 1970s, meanwhile, London almost disappeared from the Bond films. The producers knew what they were doing: these were grim years for London, the scruffy, seedy capital of a downbeat, dilapidated country, haunted by strikes, power cuts and IRA bombs.
Had Roger Moore visited MI6 headquarters in the 1979 film Moonraker, he would have had to pick his way past the bin-bags festering on the pavements during the Winter of Discontent. And if he had decided to visit his old flat off the King's Road, he would have had to run the gauntlet of bottle-blonde punks spitting at him across the street.
During the Thatcher years, too, Bond kept out of London. Indeed, it was not until 1999, with Blairism in the ascendant and the capital rebranded as the heart of Cool Britannia, that he returned in earnest.
In the opening scene of The World is Not Enough, Pierce Brosnan storms down the Thames in a speedboat, pursuing a sexy bomber in a hot-air balloon. Disappointingly, the chase culminates at the Millennium Dome, which the producers evidently assumed would become a much-loved symbol of British style and success. Still, they can't be expected to get everything right.
Even so, London's appearance was a sign that something had changed. And the fact that some of Skyfall's most exhilarating sequences take place here reinforces the impression that the city's global image has been transformed.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when London was seen abroad as the shabby centrepiece of a decaying empire, it would have been unimaginable for audiences to see Bond on the Tube. But now it feels unmistakably right.
Even in New York, Paris, Moscow and Tokyo, many people now agree that London has become the most dynamic city in the world. Its 21st-century reputation is at once indelibly British and excitingly cosmopolitan, reassuringly traditional and bracingly modern — rather like James Bond himself.
Indeed, given the transformation
of London's reputation, the only surprise is that 007 bothers with Monte Carlo at all.
Welcome home, Mr Bond. We have been expecting you.
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