London

• 1. Introduction

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  London stands on the River Thames at the head of a tidal estuary that runs 50 miles down to the North Sea. It has been a major settlement for nearly 2,000 years. Its ancient core, the City of London, was founded by the Romans as Londinium and still keeps its medieval boundaries. Just to the west, the City of Westminster has held the national government and parliament for centuries. Today over 300 languages are spoken across its boroughs. More than 50 non-indigenous communities each number over 10,000 people. How did a Roman trading post become Europe's largest city economy, governed by 33 local authorities and a Greater London Authority? Who decided where its boundaries should fall, and why has the financial heart of the City fought for centuries to stay separate from its own suburbs? What lies beneath the pigeons, the foxes, and the ravens kept at the Tower of London?

• 2. From Londinium To Lundenwic

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  In 1993, the remains of a Bronze Age bridge surfaced on the south Thames foreshore, upstream from Vauxhall Bridge. Two of its timbers were radiocarbon dated to between 1750 and 1285 BC. In 2010, foundations of a large timber structure dated to between 4800 and 4500 BC were found downstream from the same bridge, where the now-underground River Effra meets the Thames.

  The Romans founded the first major settlement around AD 47, about four years after their invasion of AD 43. It lasted only until about AD 61, when the Iceni tribe led by Queen Boudica stormed the town and burnt it to the ground. The next version of Londinium prospered. It superseded Colchester as the principal city of the Roman province of Britannia in the year 100. At its height in the 2nd century, Roman London held about 60,000 people.

  With the early-5th-century collapse of Roman rule, the walled city was effectively abandoned. Roman civilisation lingered around St Martin-in-the-Fields until about 450. From about 500, an Anglo-Saxon settlement called Lundenwic grew slightly west of the old Roman city, and by about 680 it had become a major port again. Repeated Viking assaults from the 820s brought decline. The Vikings applied Danelaw over much of eastern and northern England from 886. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Alfred refounded London that year, abandoning Lundenwic and reviving life within the old Roman walls. By the 11th century, the historian Frank Stenton wrote, the town was developing the dignity and political self-consciousness appropriate to a national capital.

• 3. Crowns, Plague And Fire

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  On Christmas Day 1066, after winning the Battle of Hastings, William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King of England as William I in the newly completed Westminster Abbey. He built the Tower of London to intimidate the inhabitants. In 1097, William II began building Westminster Hall near the abbey, the basis of a new Palace of Westminster.

  In 1100, the City of London held some 18,000 people. By 1300, it had grown to nearly 100,000, flourishing under its own administration, the Corporation of London. The Black Death in the mid-14th century took nearly a third of the population. London was the focus of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. The city was also a centre of England's Jewish population before their expulsion by Edward I in 1290. During the Second Barons' War in 1264, Simon de Montfort's rebels killed 500 Jews while trying to seize records of debts.

  The population rose from about 50,000 in 1530 to about 225,000 in 1605. Shakespeare built his Globe Theatre in Southwark in 1599. There was an assassination attempt on James I in Westminster, in the Gunpowder Plot of the 5th of November 1605. London then suffered the Great Plague of 1665 to 1666, which killed some 100,000 people, a fifth of the population. In 1666, the Great Fire destroyed much of the wooden-built city. Rebuilding took over 10 years, supervised by the polymath Robert Hooke. In 1710, Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral was completed, replacing the medieval church lost in the fire.

• 4. The City That Outgrew Itself

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  London was the world's largest city from about 1831 to 1925, with a population density of 132 people per acre. The Industrial Revolution drove unprecedented urbanisation. Harding, Howell and Co. on Pall Mall became one of the first department stores. The London Underground, the world's first urban rail network, was created in response to traffic congestion. Overcrowding brought cholera epidemics that claimed 14,000 lives in 1848 and 6,000 in 1866. The Metropolitan Board of Works built a modern sewage system, diverting waste to the Thames Estuary.

  During the Second World War, the Blitz killed over 30,000 Londoners and destroyed many buildings. The Great Smog of 1952 led to the Clean Air Act 1956, which ended the pea soup fogs that had earned London the nickname the Big Smoke. From the 1940s, immigrants arrived primarily from Commonwealth countries such as Jamaica, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

  In 1965, London's political boundaries were expanded and a new Greater London Council was created. Greater London's population had fallen from an estimated peak of 8.6 million in 1939 to around 6.8 million in the 1980s. The Greater London Council was abolished in 1986, leaving the city with no central administration until the Greater London Authority arrived in 2000. On the 7th of July 2005, three Underground trains and a double-decker bus were bombed in a series of terrorist attacks. As of 2024, London was one of only two cities worldwide classified as an Alpha++ city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network.

• 5. Two Tiers Of Power

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  The mayor of London since 2016 is Sadiq Khan, who holds executive powers within a two-tier system. The Greater London Authority coordinates a citywide strategic tier, while 33 local administrations handle the local one. The London Assembly scrutinises the mayor's decisions and can accept or reject the annual budget. The GLA oversees most of London's transport through Transport for London, along with the police and fire services. Its headquarters is City Hall in Newham.

  The 32 London boroughs and the City of London Corporation run most local services, from planning and schools to libraries and refuse collection. In 2009 to 2010, revenue spending by London councils and the GLA came to just over 22 billion pounds, split between 14.7 billion for the boroughs and 7.4 billion for the GLA.

  London is the seat of the Government of the United Kingdom, with the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street close to the Palace of Westminster along Whitehall. There are 75 members of Parliament from London. As of June 2024-59 were from the Labour Party, 9 were Conservatives, 6 were Liberal Democrats and one seat was held by an independent. The ministerial post of Minister for London, created in 1994, has been vacant since July 2024.

• 6. The Tidal River

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  At high tide, the Thames once reached five times its present width, a broad and shallow river fringed by extensive wetlands. London grew up at the river's lowest bridging point. The Thames crosses the city from the south-west to the east, surrounded by a flood plain and gently rolling hills including Parliament Hill, Addington Hills and Primrose Hill. Since the Victorian era the river has been embanked, and many of its tributaries now flow underground.

  The Thames is tidal, and London is vulnerable to flooding. The threat has grown with a continuous rise in high water level, driven by climate change and the slow tilting of the British Isles through post-glacial rebound. Two miles east of central London, the Thames Barrier was completed in 1982 to protect the city against tidal surges from the North Sea.

  London has a temperate oceanic climate, with average annual precipitation of about 600 millimetres spread across 109.6 rainy days a year. Its average July high is 23.5 degrees Celsius. Each year it sees 31 days above 25 degrees and 4.2 days above 30 degrees. The urban heat island effect can make the centre several degrees warmer than the outskirts. Experts worry that households may run out of water before 2050.

• 7. A City Of Many Tongues

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  In the 2021 census, 3,575,739 people, or 40.6 per cent of London's population, were foreign-born. About 56.8 per cent of children born in London in 2021 had a mother who was born abroad. A net 726,000 immigrants arrived between 1991 and 2001. London's median age in 2018 was 36.5 years, younger than the UK median of 40.3.

  The 2021 census reported that 53.8 per cent of inhabitants were White, while 23.9 per cent of school pupils were White British. Indians accounted for 7.5 per cent of the population, followed by Bangladeshis at 3.7 per cent and Pakistanis at 3.3 per cent. At the census, 78.4 per cent of Londoners spoke English as their first language, with Romanian, Spanish, Polish, Bengali and Portuguese the next most common.

  Christians were the largest religious grouping at 40.66 per cent, followed by those of no religion at 20.7 per cent and Muslims at 15 per cent. Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, opened in 1701, is the oldest continually active synagogue in Europe. Southall is home to the largest Sikh temple outside India. Cockney is heard mainly among working-class people of East London, while Multicultural London English emerged among young people from diverse backgrounds, especially Afro-Caribbean and South Asian.

• 8. Stages, Galleries And Studios

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  Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play, has performed in the West End since 1952. London has the biggest theatre audience of any city in the world and is one of the four fashion capitals. Alongside New York, it has been described as the cultural capital of the world. The pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales set out for Canterbury from London, and H. G. Wells sent Martians to invade the city in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.

  The British Museum, established in Bloomsbury in 1753, was the first museum of its kind and now holds 7 million artefacts from around the globe. In 2024 it was the most visited attraction in the UK, with 6,479,952 visitors. The National Gallery followed in 1824 in Trafalgar Square. The Tate collection moved in 2000 to Tate Modern, housed in the former Bankside Power Station. The British Library is the second largest library in the world.

  The record label EMI was formed in London in 1931, and an early employee, Alan Blumlein, created stereo sound that year. The Beatles recorded many of their hits at Abbey Road Studios. London's film studios produced the James Bond and Harry Potter series, and the city houses six of the world's largest visual effects companies, including Framestore. The Imaginarium, a digital performance-capture studio, was founded by Andy Serkis.

  Opened in 1863, the London Underground is the oldest and third-longest metro system in the world. It serves 272 stations, and over 4 million journeys are made on it every day. It was formed from several private companies, including the world's first underground railway, which opened in 1890. The east-west Elizabeth line opened in May 2022 as Europe's biggest construction project, with a projected cost of 15 billion pounds. Waterloo is Britain's busiest station, with over 184 million passengers annually.

  London has the busiest city airspace in the world. Heathrow Airport in Hillingdon was for many years the busiest in the world for international traffic and is the major hub of British Airways. Its fifth terminal opened in March 2008. Gatwick handles flights to more destinations than any other UK airport, while Stansted serves the greatest number of European destinations.

  The red double-decker bus first appeared in 1947 with the AEC Regent III RT. The network now runs 24 hours a day with about 9,300 vehicles across over 675 routes. Zebra crossings, the world's first marked pedestrian crossings, appeared across London in 1951. The Austin Motor Company began making London taxis in 1929, and the black cabs became part of the city's tradition. A congestion charge introduced in 2003 cut the average number of cars entering the centre on a weekday from 195,000 to 125,000.