LONDON

Skyline of London from the Golden Gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral, looking north-northeast. Just city, capital of the United Kingdom and the centre of the Commonwealth. It lies astride the River Thames in southeastern England, 50 miles (80 km) from the river's estuary on the North Sea. The city was once the industrial, commercial, and political hub of a wealthy and extensive empire; it continues to be the United Kingdom's main centre of population, commerce, and culture. The chalk basin within which London is built is filled with younger sediments, including solid rock, sands, clays, terraced pebble gravels, and Thames alluvium. The climate within the basin is relatively mild, with mean temperatures ranging from 37.4 F (3 C) in January to 72.5 F (22.5 C) in July; rainfall amounts to 23 inches (584 mm) a year. Founded by the Romans as Londinium in the 1st century AD, the town experienced tremendous growth in trade and population during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Extensive building projects were initiated after the Great Fire in 1666, and London became the dominant centre not only of the nation but of its expanding empire. During the 19th century the problems caused by rapid industrialization, such as environmental pollution and disease, were slowly remedied through advances in public health and other services. Heavy damage from aerial bombings during World War II brought the greatest setback in the history of modern London. Reconstruction and new development restored much of the city's grandeur, and relocation of manufacturing and shipping outside the city shrank its population and hastened its transition to a centre of international trade and finance. Tourism and retail trade are other major sectors of the city's economy, and, because London is the nation's capital, government services are also important. The City of London, 1.2 square miles (3.2 square km) in area, is the core of what is called Inner London, which contains the City of London and 13 of the 33 boroughs of Greater London (see table). The central financial district of the City of London is located just north of London Bridge. Within this area is Lombard Street, the traditional banking street, as well as the Bank of England headquarters, the Royal Exchange, and the Stock Exchange. To the east is the fortress-castle known as the Tower of London, whose core dates from the late 11th century and is surrounded by constructions from many periods of English architecture. To the west lie the Inns of Court, longtime chambers and offices of barristers and lawyers-in-training, and the Royal Courts of Justice, or Law Courts. The City of London and the City of Westminster are linked by the Strand, an avenue along which are located two of London's historic churches, St. Clement Dane's and St. Mary le Strand. The City of Westminster, which stretches along the River Thames, is one of London's wealthiest boroughs and is famed for its commitment to historic renovation. It includes Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, the principal government offices, important shopping districts, Scotland Yard, luxury hotels, the Tate Gallery, and the National Gallery. Retail shopping areas are concentrated around Oxford Street. Kensington Road and Knightsbridge are also major shopping districts. The shops spread west and south, down such high-scale shopping areas as Sloane Street, to connect with the trendier King's Road in Chelsea. London's East End, containing neighbourhoods such as Aldgate and Whitechapel, is now mainly within the borough of Tower Hamlets. The area, which is historically associated with the Cockney dialect, became an infamous slum during the 19th century. The East End was the most heavily bombed area of London during World War II and subsequently benefited from extensive rehabilitation. Parks, gardens, and churchyards abound in Inner London. The most celebrated parklands are the six royal parks that sweep through London's West End: St. James's Park, oldest of the six, bordered on the north by the mile-long Mall that terminates at the Queen Victoria Memorial; Buckingham Palace Gardens, bordered on the east by the royal residence; Green Park, plainest of the royal parks but fringed on the east by lavish, once-private buildings; Hyde Park, with its famous Speakers' Corner for soapbox orators; the more elegant Kensington Gardens, with the Victorian Gothic Albert Memorial; and Regent's Park, home of the London Zoo and Regent's (Grand Union) Canal. Squares and variously shaped commons are prominent features of London's landscape. Of note are Grosvenor Square, site of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, and Trafalgar Square, which features Nelson's Column, a 185-foot (56-metre) column with a statue of Lord Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), at its top; the National Gallery borders Trafalgar Square. London's other major cultural institutions include the British Museum, which houses collections of antiquities, prints, and manuscripts; the British Library; the Victoria and Albert Museum of decorative arts; and the music and arts complex located on the South Bank of the Thames, begun in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. The development of the city's outlying areas was promoted by the opening of the world's first electric underground railway in 1890. Major roads and rail lines radiate in all directions. Dock activity and river traffic are controlled by the Port of London Authority. The London (Heathrow) International Airport is located in the western reaches of Greater London. Area City, 1.2 square miles (3.2 square km); Inner London, 118 square miles (306 square km); Greater London, 656 square miles (1,699 square km). Pop. (1994 est.) City, 5,200; Inner London, 2,434,400; Greater London, 6,967,400. city, seat of Middlesex county, southeastern Ontario, Canada. It lies at the forks of the Thames River, midway between Lakes Ontario (east) and St. Clair (west) and Lakes Huron (north) and Erie (south). Its name and site were chosen in 1792 for the location of a capital of Upper Canada, but the plans failed to materialize, and settlement did not take place until 1826. Serving as a British garrison town during the mid-19th century, London developed into an important transportation and industrial centre as a result of its interlake location. It lies at the hub of extensive rail and highway networks radiating into the surrounding agricultural region, which produces fruit, vegetables, grain, and dairy products. London's industries include the manufacture of food products, brass and steel products, diesel locomotives, textiles, electrical appliances, and clothing. The city is a seat of Anglican and Roman Catholic dioceses, as well as the University of Western Ontario (founded in 1878) and its affiliated schools. Inc. village, 1840; town, 1848; city, 1854. Pop. (1991) city, 303,165; metropolitan area, 381,522. Engraving of London (c. 1616) by Claes Jansz Visscher; in the Guildhall Library, City of London. city, capital of the United Kingdom. It lies astride the River Thames 50 miles (about 80 km) upstream from its estuary on the North Sea. In satellite photographs the metropolis can be seen to sit compactly in a Green Belt of open land, with the M25 orbital motorway threaded around it at a radius of about 20 miles (30 km) from the city centre. The growth of the built-up area was halted by strict town planning controls in the mid-1950s. Its physical limits more or less correspond to the administrative and statistical boundaries separating the metropolitan county of Greater London from the home counties of Kent, Surrey, and Berkshire (in clockwise order) to the south of the river and Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, and Essex to the north. The historic counties of Kent, Hertfordshire, and Essex, extend in area beyond the current administrative counties with the same names to include substantial parts of the metropolitan county of Greater London, which was formed in 1965. Most of Greater London south of the Thames belongs to the historic county of Surrey, while most of Greater London north of the Thames belongs historically to the county of Middlesex. Area (Greater London) 659 square miles (1,706 square km). Pop. Greater London, (1991) 6,679,699; (1998 est.) 7,187,300. Interactive map of Greater London. If the border of the metropolis is well defined, its internal structure is immensely complicated and defies description. Indeed, London's defining characteristic is an absence of overall form. It is physically a polycentric city, with many core districts and no clear hierarchy among them. London has at least two (and sometimes many more) of everything: cities, mayors, dioceses, cathedrals, chambers of commerce, police forces, opera houses, orchestras, and universities. In every aspect it functions as a compound or confederal metropolis. Historically, London grew from three distinct centres: the walled settlement founded by the Romans on the banks of the Thames in the 1st century CE, today known as the City of London, the Square Mile or simply the City; facing it across the bridge on the lower gravels of the south bank, the suburb of Southwark; and a mile upstream, on a great southward bend of the river, the City of Westminster. The three settlements had distinct and complementary roles. London, the City, developed as a centre of trade, commerce, and banking. Southwark, the Borough, became known for its monasteries, hospitals, inns, fairs, pleasure houses, and the great theatres of Elizabethan Londonthe Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), and Shakespeare's Globe (1599). Westminster grew up around an abbey, which brought a royal palace and, in its train, the entire central apparatus of the British stateits legislature, executive, and judiciary. It also boasts spacious parks and the most fashionable districts for living and shoppingthe West End. The north-bank settlements merged into a single built-up area in the early decades of the 17th century, but they did not combine into a single enlarged municipality. The City of London was unique among Europe's capital cities in retaining its medieval boundaries. Westminster and other suburbs were left to develop their own administrative structuresa pattern replicated a hundred times over as London exploded in size, becoming the prototype of the modern metropolis. Map of London (c. 1900) from the 10th edition of Encyclopdia Britannica. The The population of London already exceeded one million by 1800. A century later it reached 6.5 million. The city's physical expansion was not constrained either by military defenses (a highly influential factor on mainland Europe) or by the intervention of state power (so evident in the town planning of Paris, Vienna, Rome, and other capitals of continental Europe). Although much of the land around London was owned by the aristocracy, the church, and other institutions with feudal roots, its development was the work of unfettered capitalism driven by the housing demands of the rising middle class. Free-ranging building speculation engulfed villages and small towns over an ever-widening radius with each improvement in transport technology and purchasing power. The solidly built-up area of London measured some 5 miles (8 km) from east to west in 1750, 15 miles (24 km) in 1850, and 30 miles (50 km) in 1950. The evacuation and bombing during World War II were a turning point in London's history because they brought the long era of expansive suburbanization to a sudden end. It was decided by the government that the metropolis had grown too much for its own economic and social good and that its growth was a strategic risk. A Green Belt was imposed after the war, and subsequent growth was diverted beyond it. Later London's administrative boundaries were redrawn to incorporate almost the entire physical metropolis, an area of 656 square miles (1,699 square km) known as Greater London (see the table Greater London at a Glance). The western towers of Westminster Abbey, London, completed c. 1745 under the direction of Sir The London known to international visitors is a much smaller place than that. Tourist traffic concentrates on an area defined by the main attractions, each drawing between one and seven million visitors in the course of the year: the British Museum, the National Gallery, Westminster Abbey, Madame Tussaud's waxwork collection, the Tower of London, the three great South Kensington museums (Natural History, Science, and Victoria and Albert), and the Tate galleries. In scale, visitors' London resembles the metropolis as it was in the late 18th century, a city of perhaps 10 square miles (26 square km) explorable on foot in all directions from Trafalgar Square. Resident Londoners see the metropolis in even more localized terms. Property correspondents and estate agents like to describe London as a collection of villages, and there is some truth in their clich. Because London had developed in a dispersed, haphazard fashion from an early stage, many of its later suburbs were able to grow around, or within reach of, some existing nucleus such as a church, coaching inn, mill, parkland, or common. Buildings of different ages and types help to define the character of residential areas as well as to relieve suburban monotony. The population in the various neighbourhoods tends to be diverse because the working of the English housing market has provided most areas, even the most exclusive, with at least some public rental housing. The chemistry of location, building stock, local amenities, and property values combines with that of a multiethnic population to give rise to a great variety of residential microcosms within the metropolis. Neighbourhood ties are strong. Wherever Londoners meet and talk, they avidly compare nuances of the districts in which they live because where they live seems to count for as much as who they are. Additional reading Physical and human geography Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, London Encyclopaedia, rev. and updated ed. (1993), is an indispensable, massive reference work with a detailed index; it covers locations, buildings, people, and historical events. Keith Hoggart and David Green, London: A New Metropolitan Geography (1991), collects academic essays on aspects of the society and economy of modern London. Donald J. Olsen, Town Planning in London, 2nd ed. (1982), a magisterial work, studies the interplay between aristocratic landowners and speculative builders that gave London its great 18th- and 19th-century estates. Alan A. Jackson, Semi-Detached London: Suburban Development, Life, and Transport, 190039 (1973), provides a full and fascinating account of London's interwar suburbanization. Gavin Weightman and Steve Humphries, The Making of Modern London, 18151914 (1983), and The Making of Modern London, 19141939 (1984), are good popular histories that are well illustrated. John Hillaby, John Hillaby's London (1987), is an idiosyncratic essay on highways and byways, full of insights, by a celebrated literary pedestrian. Peter Hall, London 2001 (1989), provides a forward-looking analysis of change in the London region by England's best-known academic planner. Michael John Hebbert History Hugh Clout (ed.), The Times London History Atlas (1991), contains more than 300 maps and illustrations in addition to substantial text and bibliography covering the development of the metropolis from its origins to the 1990s. Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1994), provides an account of the capital from medieval times to the present; as does John Richardson, London & Its People (1995). Felix Barker and Peter Jackson, London: 2,000 Years of a City and Its People (1974, reissued 1984), provides a well-illustrated discussion of a broad time span. Ralph Merrifield, London: City of the Romans (1983), presents recent archaeological discoveries. Christopher N.L. Brooke and Gillian Keir, London, 8001216: The Shaping of a City (1975), deals with political and economic changes in the early medieval period. Mary D. Lobel and W.H. Johns (eds.), The City of London from Prehistoric Times to c. 1520 (1989), contains scholarly essays and a number of extremely detailed maps. Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 13001500 (1948, reprinted 1989), remains the classic scholarly study of the socioeconomic life of London's commercial elite. Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 12001540 (1989), provides a detailed analysis of London's western settlement during its important medieval formative phase. John Schofield, The Building of London: From the Conquest to the Great Fire, rev. ed. (1993), traces changes in the growth and internal character of the city over a wide period. John Stow, A Survey of London, ed. by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vol. (1908, reprinted 1971), contains Stow's text of 1603 with additional notes tracing his sources of information. Norman Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London (1935), is a well-referenced work based largely on original sources. T.F. Reddaway, The Rebuilding of London After the Great Fire (1940, reissued 1951), discusses the economic and social forces that shaped the rebuilding. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the XVIIIth Century (1925, reissued 1984), chiefly records the life and work of poorer Londoners, using many quotations to provide contemporary points of view. John Summerson, Georgian London, new ed. (1988), a scholarly study, deals with the great estates and architecture of 18th-century London. Donald J. Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (1976), well illustrated, discusses the key aspects of metropolitan growth during the 19th century. David Kynaston, The City of London (1994 ), provides a history of the financial City from 1815 to the present. Andrew Saint (ed.), Politics and the People of London: The London County Council, 18891965 (1989), contains thematic discussions of the important activities of the Council. Hugh D. Clout The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica