History of London

~ Roman and Saxon London
London was founded as a communications center by the Romans shortly after they invaded Britain in AD 43.

Known as Londinium, the town was located at the northern end of the bridge the Romans had built across the Thames, on a route to their provincial capital at Colchester in eastern England.

Londinium’s rectangular plan was typical of Roman colonial towns, with two main streets intersecting at the large basilica, or public building, about where the Bank of England stands today.

Other elements of the urban fabric were a forum, a temple complex, a governor’s palace, a wharf along the river for landing, a large fort (portions of which can still be seen at the Barbican Centre), and a great wall, built about ad 200, which roughly enclosed the area that later became the City.

The Romans withdrew from London and Britain in the early 5th century, and little is known about the city until the Saxons, under Alfred the Great, regained the city from Danish invaders in the 9th century.

At the end of the Saxon period, which lasted until the 11th century, London’s population is estimated to have been between 10,000 and 12,000, about a third of what it had been under the Romans.

London’s commercial role depended on its strategic location between the wool-growing areas of England, which were located north of London and in East Anglia, and the manufacturing towns of the Netherlands.

The foundations for some of London’s most enduring features were laid during the Saxon years.

One such feature, London’s various and unique neighborhoods, resulted from the Saxons modifying the Romans’ orderly street pattern into an informal settlement made up of scattered villages.

And the twin poles of the future London, with the monarchy and government in the west (Westminster) and business in the east (the City), hail back to the last Saxon king, Edward the Confessor. He moved his palace two miles west of the walled city to be near the church he was building, Westminster Abbey.

~ Medieval London
The Norman conquest in 1066 set the stage for mixing French into London’s Saxon character.

William the Conqueror, who had himself crowned William I of England, built a great tower “against the fickleness of the vast and fierce population.”

The original portion, the 27-m (90-ft) stone White Tower, was whitewashed to intensify its dramatic appearance. It was both a royal residence and a jail for political prisoners.

The tower’s Romanesque style, with its rounded arches, still conveys a sense of solidity and strength.

William also guaranteed the city would retain the rights and privileges it had under the Saxons, such as its local court system run by elders.

During this period, London emerged as the English capital and as an active commercial city on the fringe of the northern European trading system.

The commercial City, where most people lived and worked, filled in the walled area of the old Roman site.

The monarchy and court resided at Westminster, connected to the City by the Strand, which later developed into a major street.

In 1300 London’s total population was probably about 35,000, less than half that of Paris, the largest city in Europe.

In the 1340s about a third of London’s residents fell victim to the Black Death (bubonic plague), but the population recovered to about 40,000 by 1500.

London’s place in the international wool trade led many foreign traders to take up residence in the City: Danes, Germans, Flemings, and especially northern Italians, who established themselves as bankers.

Local trade was concentrated in two large markets, Cheapside (cheap was the Saxon word for “market”), a general produce market, and Eastcheap, a market for fish and meat.

Side streets specialized in products still remembered by names such as Milk Street, Bread Street, Poultry Lane, and Ironmonger’s Lane. The main fish market was at Billingsgate quay on the river.

During this period, artisans started organizing into guilds, which not only set standards for their particular craft but helped and protected their artisans.

Along with the merchants, the guilds effectively governed the City and regulated its trade. The first mention of a mayor dates back to 1189.

A Common Council, a group of citizens that met regularly with the city elders on common affairs, dates from the 14th century.

The seat of civic government for the City was, and still is, the Guildhall, whose current building dates to the 15th century.

The bustling commercial city was also an actively religious community. At Westminster, the original Romanesque Westminster Abbey was replaced in stages in the 13th century by the present magnificent French Gothic structure (see Gothic Art and Architecture).

In the City, the Old Saint Paul’s Cathedral was greatly enlarged during the 13th century, with a spire rising to more than 140 m (450 ft). There were small parish churches on almost every street.

Dozens of monasteries, set in large grounds, dominated many parts of the city. Convents and hospitals of various orders were located in the suburbs.

The medieval labyrinth of London was characterized by narrow, congested streets lined with tiny shops and houses built of wood and plaster, with second stories jutting out beyond the ground floor.

This tendency to cluster into crowded spaces even applied to London Bridge, which was considerably more than just a river crossing.

A new stone bridge was begun in 1176 to replace the old wooden bridge that had been repaired and rebuilt multiple times over the preceding 1000 years. The new bridge was crowded with houses and shops and even a chapel.

~ Tudor and Stuart London
Between 1485 and 1600 London’s population grew to 200,000, then by the end of the 17th century shot up to 575,000, surpassing Paris as the largest city in Europe.

During this period, the city was the center of a tremendous expansion in trade, colonization, and finance.

This immense growth was exemplified by the establishment of the Royal Exchange in the 1560s by financier Sir Thomas Gresham; the founding of the English East India Company in 1600; the organizing of joint stock companies by London investors to colonize Ireland and Virginia early in the 17th century (see Ulster Plantation); and the founding of the Bank of England by City merchants in 1694.

London was also the center of the English cultural Renaissance, particularly in literature, with major figures such as Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare.

The urban fabric of London was transformed in this period, partly due to Henry VIII dissolving the Catholic monasteries in the 1530s as part of the English Reformation.

Aristocrats acquired these former church properties from the king and opened them to development, which led to building inside and outside the City walls on a large scale. An example was the development of Covent Garden as a residential square by the earl of Bedford, whose family had obtain this valuable property once associated with Westminster Abbey.

One of London’s first squares, Covent Garden was designed by architect Inigo Jones in the early 1630s.

As the king’s surveyor general, Jones brought classical architectural style to London with such buildings as the Banqueting Hall in 1619 and the Queen’s Chapel in 1623.

Classical architecture, modeled after ancient Greek and Roman architecture, is known for its use of columns, arches, and vaults.

London survived the disruption of the English Revolution during the 1640s and 1650s, and like much of southeastern England, supported the Parliamentary cause against the king.

More devastating to London was the Great Plague of 1665, which killed as many as 100,000 Londoners, and the Great Fire of London that followed in the next year.

In four terrifying days in September 1666, 80 percent of the City burned to the ground, including Saint Paul’s Cathedral, 87 churches, and 13,200 houses.

Rebuilding London after the fire took place quickly using the tangle of preexisting property lines and streets, in spite of hopes for a more formal plan by architect Christopher Wren.

New building regulations dictated the use of brick rather than wood as a way to prevent future calamities.

Wren’s designs for the new Saint Paul’s, with its great dome and baroque towers, made it a key symbol of the modernized city. He also designed about 50 parish churches, such as Saint Bride’s off Fleet Street.

~ Georgian London
London grew quickly during the Georgian age, between 1714 and the 1830s.

By 1801 the population of the city and its outlying areas had passed the 1 million mark, and by 1837 was close to 2 million.

London was the hub of an immense empire (in spite of losing its American colonies in the American Revolution), its wealth coming from trade with the East and West Indies.

Trade and shipping were facilitated by the building of giant new docks early in the 19th century, such as the West India Dock and the London Dock in the East End, to replace the old, crowded port located between London Bridge and the Tower.

Culturally, it was the age of Dr. Samuel Johnson, London’s most literary and crusty defender:

“You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Georgian London, however, was becoming two cities, based on wealth and residence. The West End emerged as the residential and shopping center of the wealthy.

Aristocrats who owned large rural estates developed them into London suburbs, using the residential square as the focal point of formally planned districts, unlike anything in older parts of London, where development was more unsystematic.

Grosvenor, Bedford, Belgrave, and Russell squares were all built during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Thousands of terraces (row houses) were built in the uniform Georgian style, many with extravagant interiors by fashionable architects such as Robert Adam and John Nash.

Nash also designed palatial terraces, including Cumberland Terrace at Regent’s Park in the 1820s.

The Greek Revival style of classicism, with its straight lines and columns, dominated the design of a number of public buildings built in the early 19th century, such as the British Museum, University College, and the National Gallery.

Nash’s major public planning ventures included Regent Street in 1812, designed as a grand processional leading to the north, and Trafalgar Square in the 1830s, in honor of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

The other Georgian London was the East End, with its dockyards, and the islands of poverty scattered through the rest of the city.

Child mortality, disease, and crime were prevalent in these areas.

The desperate situation was worsened by high consumption of gin.

Social violence, crime, and major demonstrations were common, especially during the early reign of George III.

Notable during this period were the riots led by John Wilkes in the late 1760s, in which he called for freedom of the press and political reforms, and the Gordon Riots of 1780, headed by Protestant leader Lord George Gordon against pro-Catholic legislation.

An official police force (the world’s first) was authorized by Parliament and organized by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, replacing the policing done by parish constables and private watchmen.

~ Victorian and Edwardian London
The phenomenal population growth between 1837 and 1914 made London the world’s largest city.

Between 1851 and 1901, London’s population went from 2.5 million to 6.5 million.

London was Britain’s economic powerhouse and the center of a burgeoning empire.

Suburban expansion of an unprecedented scale swallowed up former countryside and villages in all directions.

Residential housing in the City declined as it became a commercial and financial enclave.

The railroads were key engines of change in the city.

Among the earliest was the London and Birmingham, which connected the manufacturing center to London’s northern suburbs at Euston Station by the late 1830s.

Eventually the inner city was ringed by lavish railway stations, such as Saint Pancras, a sort of medieval fairy-tale castle built in the 1860s.

The underground railway began in the 1860s and, with electrification in the 1890s, was able to use deep tunnels to bring passengers to the heart of the city.

The old London Bridge was replaced by a modern version in the 1830s, and the Tower Bridge, a marvel of modern engineering, opened in 1894, to become London’s most recognizable landmark.

The large glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolized London’s place as the capital of the industrial age.

The most spectacular public building of the age was the New Palace of Westminster, the Houses of Parliament, designed by Sir Charles Barry in 1835 and completed in 1860, which ushered in the new Gothic Revival style of the Victorian era, with its use of ornate decoration, spires, and towers.

London’s reputation for progress was matched by its image as a city of degradation and poverty.

The railways slashed their way through slum districts, displacing thousands.

The slums of the East End and Soho received particular attention from observers and writers.

Some of the novels of Charles Dickens portrayed the human misery in graphic terms, as did Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and London Poor, based on research carried out in the 1840s and 1850s.

Charles Booth’s massive 17-volume Life and Labour of the People of London, published between 1891 and 1903, helped pressure the new London County Council to take action by providing public housing and by taking over public ownership of gas, water, electricity, and transport.

Efforts to solve London’s problems by building new “garden cities,” such as Letchworth in the early 1900s, were popular with reformers but did little to alleviate the situation in the metropolis as a whole.

Garden cities were planned communities in gardenlike settings and included industry as well as homes so that residents would not have to commute to London on a daily basis.

~ London in the 20th Century and After
London was still the largest city in the world at the beginning of the century, but was surpassed by New York by 1920.

London continued to grow, however, between the world wars, and peaked at more than 8 million people in 1951.

During the interwar years there was an increased expansion to the suburbs, made possible by the extension of the underground and the automobile.

The London County Council built council housing in both the inner city and in the suburbs, which relieved the housing shortage, and developers emphasized semidetached suburban homes. (A semidetached house is one that shares a common wall with another residence.)

German bombings during World War II, especially the Blitz between September 1940 and May 1941, devastated vast areas of London, particularly in the City and the East End.

As many as 30,000 Londoners died, and another 50,000 were injured. More than 130,000 houses were destroyed.

After the war, contractors tore down older buildings and put up acres of concrete-and-glass towers in places like the Barbican and around Saint Paul’s.

The concrete, bunkerlike South Bank Centre was an attempt to rejuvenate the desolate area south of the river with a new cultural complex.

London also experienced an influx of immigrants from the West Indies during the 1950s, and racial and class tensions flared in the late 1950s in the Notting Hill area, where many immigrants from the Caribbean had settled.

In the “swinging sixties” London had a brief fling as a center of youth culture, pop music, fashion, and film. But industry left the city, and the population declined to 7.3 million in 1971.

A massive initiative took place in the 1980s to redevelop the East End’s abandoned Dockland area into a business center. This resulted in the construction of the 250-m (800-ft), stainless steel Canary Wharf Tower, the tallest building in the United Kingdom, and the Docklands Light Railway to transport people to the new Docklands. This development has only been partially successful and remains relatively isolated from other parts of London.

Socially, racial unrest occurred in the 1980s in Brixton, an area noted for its high crime, as tensions flared between white police and black residents.

Central London was the site of a massive riot in 1990 after the Conservative government replaced the property tax with a community charge tax.

Londoners were irate because the new tax, soon dubbed a poll tax, set a fixed amount to be paid per person rather than taxing people according to their income level.

Londoners have also had to endure periodic bomb attacks by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Although London has suffered some growing pains through its history, there are reasons to be optimistic about its future.

Its population is increasing again. Major buildings, such as the British Museum and the Royal Opera House, are being extensively renovated. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has been reconstructed in Southwark, near its original location, complete with thatched roof and natural lighting, in an effort to regenerate the spirit of the city’s most creative, dramatic era.

London was the target of a major terrorist attack in July 2005 when four bombs exploded in the central part of the city.

The bombings targeted trains in the city’s underground subway system and a commuter bus during the morning rush hour.

An investigation soon identified four British Muslim men as the suspected bombers. The attacks killed 56 people, including the suspected bombers, and injured about 700 others.

The bombings came the day after the International Olympic Committee announced that it had chosen London to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. It also coincided with a summit meeting of the Group of Eight in nearby Scotland.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the bombings were a terrorist attack timed to coincide with the opening of the summit.

Exactly two weeks after the July 7 attack, another apparent terrorist attack targeted the city’s transportation system again. However, officials said only the detonators of the bombs exploded, and no one was injured.