London, England
London, city, capital of the United Kingdom. It is among the oldest of the world’s great cities—its history spanning nearly two millennia—and one of the most cosmopolitan. By far Britain’s largest metropolis, it is also the country’s economic, transportation, and cultural centre.
London is situated in southeastern England, lying astride the River Thames some 50 miles (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 its principal ring highway (the M25 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, 607 square miles (1,572 square km). Pop. (2001) Greater London, 7,172,091; (2011 prelim.) Greater London, 8,173,941.
Character of the city
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 London—the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), and the world-famous Globe (1599).
Westminster grew up around an abbey, which brought a royal palace and, in its train, the entire central apparatus of the British state—its legislature, executive, and judiciary. It also boasts spacious parks and the most fashionable districts for living and shopping—the 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 structures—a pattern replicated a hundred times over as London exploded in size, becoming the prototype of the modern metropolis.
Landscape of London
City site
Geologic foundation
The landscape of southeastern England is shaped by an undulating bed of thick white chalk, consisting of a pure limestone speckled with flint nodules in the upper beds. Under the chalk are an incomplete layer of Upper Greensand (a Cretaceous rock; 65 to 145 million years old) and a 200-foot- (60-metre-) thick waterproof layer of Gault clay. Beneath them in turn lies London’s true geologic foundation, a stable platform of old hard rocks of Paleozoic age (about 250 to 540 million years old). This basement is buried nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) below London, sloping away southward to depths more than 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) below the English Channel.
The London Basin is a wedge-shaped declivity bounded to the south by the chalk of North Downs, running north to south, and to the north by the chalk outcrop of the Chiltern Hills, running up in a northeasterly direction from the Goring Gap. The chalk floor of the basin carries a sequence of clays and sands of the Neogene and Paleogene periods (those 2.6 to 65 million years old), chiefly the stiff, gray-blue London Clay, which lies up to 433 feet (132 meters) thick under the metropolis and supports most of its tunnels and deeper foundations. The subsoil is topped with deposits of gravel up to 33 feet (10 meters) deep, consisting mostly of pebbles with flint, quartz, and quartzite. There are also patchy deposits of brick earth, a mixture of clay and sand often excavated for building materials. Lastly, modern London is built on “made ground,” the deposits of centuries of continuous human occupation, which have accumulated on average between 10 and 16 feet (3 and 5 meters) in the oldest urban nuclei of the City and Westminster.
The valley of the Thames
The metropolis grew and spilled over a more or less symmetrical valley site defined by shallow gravel and clay ridges rising to about 450 feet (140 meters) on the north at Hampstead and about 380 feet (115 meters) at Upper Norwood 11 miles (18 km) to the south. Between these broken heights to the north and south, the ground falls away in a series of graded plateaus formed by gravel terraces—some at 100–150 feet (30–45 meters; the Boyn terraces, such as Islington, Putney, and Richmond) and a second and more extensive level, the Taplow terraces, at 50–100 feet (15–30 meters), on which sit the City of London, the West End, the East End, and the elevated southern districts such as Peckham, Battersea, and Clap ham. The lowest ground, just a few feet above high-tide level, is the extensive floodplain of the valley floor. The Thames scours the confining terraces to the north and south as it meanders toward the sea.
The Romans founded the city of London where the northernmost meander undercuts the higher gravel terrace to form a steep bluff. There, at the upper limit of tidal navigation, was an ideal location for defense and commerce alike. Most of London’s subsequent growth extended from this nucleus along the better-drained terraces of the north bank. Building remained more difficult in the alluvial ground south of the river until the completion of tidal embankments in the 19th century.
To complete the picture of London’s site in its natural state before building took place, one must add the tributary streams running north and south from the hills to the great river on the valley floor, many of them rising from springs in the gravel. Those in the center of town have long since been culverted over, except where they do duty as ornamental water in parks (e.g., the Serpentine in Hyde Park). Their names survive in the topography of London: Holborn, Fleet Street, Walbrook. Away from central London are a series of larger tributaries, used variously for navigation and associated activities, water supply, gravel quarrying, and ornament and recreation.
To the northwest the River Colne and the River Crane join the Thames at Staines and at Isle worth, respectively; to the northeast the Lea, a substantial river draining much of Hertfordshire, enters the Thames just beyond the Isle of Dogs at Blackwall; and the River Roding merges into it about 4 miles (6 km) downstream at Barking. South London has a series of smaller rivers leading north to the main stream: the Ravensbourne flows through Bromley, Lewisham, and Deptford, entering the tidal Thames at Greenwich; the River Wandle rises near Croydon and flows down through Merton and Tooting to join the Thames at Wandsworth; Beverley Brook rises in Sutton and runs at the foot of Wimbledon Common and through Richmond Park and Barnes Common, emerging from a culvert at Barn Elms; the Hogsmill River flows down from the Epsom Downs to Kingston upon Thames; and, in the southwest corner of modern London, the River Mole drains the Surrey hills to join the Thames opposite Hampton Court.
People
Settlement patterns
Demographic trends
From a total population of 5.6 million in 1891, London grew by 3 million to its peak magnitude at the outbreak of World War II. For several decades after the war, its population shrank by approximately 2 million, to some 6.6 million in the mid-1980s. The decline occurred for reasons common to all large cities of its type. Increasing leisure and holiday time, shorter working hours, and access to the automobile freed people from the ties of proximity to their place of work. Families moved out of town in search of a better quality of life. Firms moved for similar reasons, seeking more spacious and accessible sites. As the remaining population spread itself more comfortably in the dwelling stock, the three-generation household became a rarity except among ethnic minorities. Mass housing initiatives and individual “gentrification” of terraced houses tended equally to reduce population density.
The steepest fall occurred in the densest areas. Inner London boroughs lost more than one-third of their population in the postwar decades. In the 1980s the slump was eased by a fall in the rate of out-migration and a rise in the birth rates of new immigrant families. London’s population began slowly growing again in the 1990s, and by 2000 it had surpassed seven million; it is thus comparable in size to New York City, though the latter metropolis sits in a wider urban region with approximately three times the population of Greater London.
The historical base
The relative stability of total population numbers has masked a continuing population flux. London, like any great metropolis, acts as a nursery, perpetually taking in young and aspiring immigrants and releasing mature firms and families. But the hinterland has shifted. In the 19th century most movement into London was domestic; the majority of immigrants came from the neighboring Home Counties, with additional long-distance streams from Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Overseas immigrants came as well, but London was less cosmopolitan than New York City or Boston. Its alien communities were small (mostly fewer than 1,000 people) and localized, and some were long-established. Bevis Marks, the City synagogue of the Sephardic Jews, was founded in 1656. St. Peter’s Italian Church (1863) was the first Italian church ever to be built outside Italy.
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