On release, the album received critical acclaim, including being named the week's best CD by The Guardian, and inspired radio and newspaper commentary.

As part of John Peel's Meltdown Festival in June 1998, the London Musicians Collective (LMC) launched and ran a temporary radio station, Resonance 107.3 FM, over four weeks.

[2] The LMC and particularly the member Peter Cusack, an improvisational musician, used Resonance 107.3 FM as an opportunity to undertake research, asking festival goers and listeners to send in or tell of their "favourite London sound".

[7] Cusack compiled and edited the disc and recorded 35 of its tracks; the others were recorded by Matthias Krispert ("Brixton Station"), Tom Wallace ("Bus Pressure"), Bunny Schendler ("Euston Main Line Railway Station"), Clive Bell ("Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club, White Hart Lane") and Syngen Brown ("LRT Transformer, Putney").

"[10] The subjects are diverse, ranging from frying onions, "rain on skylight while lying in bed", "the call to prayer from an east London mosque",[11] double-decker buses, coffee makers, a voicemail message,[3] a bicycle crossing a canal towpath, a hissing bus door, a noisy street market, birds, traffic, taxis, trains,[9] geese,[10] wailing sirens, humming power plants, lapping rivers and "electronic bleeps at supermarket checkouts.

"[4] Kenneth Goldsmith opines that the project provides "an odd way to think about a city",[4] while according to John L. Walters, the release is "not that outlandish" as many of Cusack's prior albums, including Where Is the Green Parrot?

"[10] According to David Toop, sounds vary from famous (Big Ben and "mind the gap"), social (a club queue and Dalston Market), highly personal (a phone message), "universally shared soundmarks" ("post through letterbox", "key in door") and unusual "ear-of-the-musician" answers.

[6] Toop also characterises some sounds as possessing "a distinct air of cinema futurism", citing the "disembodied announcements echoing in public space, polyglot languages overhead on the transport system, impersonal reminders of heightened security in the beleaguered city, ageing machinery grinding toward obsolesce, its tortured wails a taunting reminder of our financially draining dependence on clockwork history.

[5] Toop's own choices were the spatial sounds of distant emergency sirens at night and the high-pitched croaks of swifts, whose appearances throughout the year provoke "seasonal nostalgia".

[6] Drummer Charles Hayward's choice was "the Deptford Grid electricity sub-station at the edge of the Thames, a saturating drone washed by waves from the river."

The booklet lists further responses which are not captured on the recording, including "a baby laughing on the Underground", "my boyfriend's orgasms and I love yous" and "none, I war earplugs.

"[10] In his review for The Guardian, Walters called Your Favourite London Sounds a "strangely comforting" and "pleasingly mundane" disc with a concept that is theoretically endless.

[15] In The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021), Sam Auinger and Dietmar Offenhuber single out the London edition for reflecting "changes in the sensory qualities of the city as a result of the expansion of the Thames shore into a recreational area.

"[7] Clive Bell of Variant magazine considers the recording of Deptford Creek to have been "particularly memorable" for bringing the power station hum with the sound of the Thames.

[1] Emily Nunn of The Chicago Tribune considers the London project to be the apogee of Cusack's field recording work, and notes Favourite Sounds of Beijing (2007) as a sequel.