London: history and heritage

About London: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE London Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

London was founded as a port, and it has never stopped trading in goods, money and people. Its layers sit one above the other: Roman walls beneath the City, a Norman tower, Wren’s churches, Georgian squares, Victorian railway stations and glass towers, all along a tidal river that has carried the world to its doors for two thousand years.

At a glance

Population: 8,799,800 in Greater London (Office for National Statistics, Census 2021); around four in ten Londoners were born outside the UK.

Names through history: Londinium (Roman), Lundenwic and Lundenburh (Anglo-Saxon), London.

Founded as a port, London has traded in goods, money and people for two thousand years.

Shaped by: Rome, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the Danes, the Normans from 1066, the merchant companies and the British Empire, and the Commonwealth migrations after 1945.

UNESCO World Heritage: the Tower of London; the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s Church; Maritime Greenwich; the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Londinium

The Romans founded Londinium around AD 47, at the lowest point where the Thames could be bridged. It was burned in Boudica’s revolt in AD 60 or 61, rebuilt, and by the early third century enclosed by a wall whose line still marks the boundary of the City of London. Pieces of it stand at Tower Hill and London Wall, and the Roman amphitheatre lies beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery.

Saxons, Vikings and Normans

After Rome left, the Anglo-Saxons traded at Lundenwic, along the Strand; Viking raids pushed the town back inside the old walls in the ninth century. In 1066 William of Normandy was crowned in Westminster Abbey, and his White Tower rose over the city. The French-speaking Normans tied England to Continental Europe, and Westminster grew into the seat of the crown and of Parliament, two miles upriver from the merchants of the City.

The Great Fire

In September 1666 the Great Fire destroyed most of the medieval City. Sir Christopher Wren rebuilt fifty-one churches and St Paul’s Cathedral, finished in 1710, and the Monument marks where the fire began. In the eighteenth century the West End spread west in Georgian squares and terraces, from Mayfair to Bloomsbury.

Empire and the docks

The East India Company, chartered in 1600, and the trading houses of the City made London the hub of a global empire. By the nineteenth century it was the largest city in the world, with vast docks in the East End, railway termini such as King’s Cross and St Pancras, and the Palace of Westminster, rebuilt in Gothic Revival style by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin after a fire in 1834. That empire was also built on the transatlantic slave trade, a history now told at the Museum of London Docklands.

A city of newcomers

London has always grown through migration. Huguenot weavers fled France for Spitalfields in the late seventeenth century; Irish families arrived in great numbers in the nineteenth; Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe made the East End their home. In 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury with passengers from the Caribbean, the start of the post-war migrations from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa that, with newcomers from across Europe and the world, have made London one of the most diverse cities anywhere: more than 300 languages are spoken in its schools.

Arts and institutions

The British Museum opened in 1759, the National Gallery was founded in 1824 and the Victoria and Albert Museum grew from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Shakespeare’s plays were first staged in the theatres of Southwark, where the rebuilt Globe now stands, and the West End is still one of the world’s great theatre districts. Many of the national museums are open to all without charge.

Our advice: walk the river from Westminster to the Tower on a weekday morning, crossing to the South Bank at Westminster Bridge and back at Tower Bridge. You pass two thousand years of London in about three miles.

Sources

Population: Office for National Statistics, Census 2021 (England and Wales). History: Museum of London; Historic Royal Palaces; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; British Museum; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “London”.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with London: history and heritage before you go.