How Was London Created?

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Permalink Reply by Michael Anderson on July 10, 2016 at 8:28

Thanks Stephen. I used to work at Apsley House on Hyde Park Corner. It was known as Number 1 London when the Duke Of Wellington lived there as it was the first house in London you came to when you approached from the west, with Knightsbridge and Kensington being villages just outside the capital. It's amazing how small London was until relatively recent times.

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Permalink Reply by Richard Woods on July 16, 2016 at 16:42

This is a very helpful guide to the formation of the administration of London. As a Londoner who has over the years travelled most of it the thing that always strikes most is that London is in fact simply a very large number of settlements, villages and town which over the years have been welded together by the building over of the green fields in between.  Our own dear Harringay contains the origins of some of these but mostly is little more than a huge speculative development of the late 19th and early 20th century. One way of understanding how London was formed after the Romans is to mark down all the churches over 900 years old - the Norman building boom.

Going further back I have my doubts that we should see London as in anyway a Roman invention. The Thames would have been for hundred of years a very important throughfare. the chosen highway of those ages - and thus we can reasonably assume that, buried or devoured by later development, are the remnants of very early settlements along the river banks - but far away from the contained and controlled river of today since then the river would have been a vast floodplain of marsh and channels, and tidal way, way up stream.

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