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London is too large to describe and too complex to summarise, so it may be more useful to approach it obliquely — through the crises it has navigated, the infrastructure it has built, and the arguments it has forced the world to have. Every city has a history, but London's is the kind that keeps arriving in the present uninvited, shaping what the city is before anyone has quite finished deciding what it was.
In September 1666, Samuel Pepys buried his Parmesan cheese in his garden to save it from the Great Fire. It is a detail so specific and so human that it has survived three and a half centuries without fading — which says something about Pepys, and something about the fire. The blaze destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most of the medieval city. What replaced it — the Wren churches, the new street patterns, the rebuilding ordinances that required brick and tile rather than timber — was not simply reconstruction but redesign. Cities that survive their disasters often come out more themselves than before.
In 1858, London's sewage problem became so catastrophic — the Thames so polluted by effluent that MPs abandoned the Houses of Parliament because of the smell — that Parliament was finally forced to act. The engineer Joseph Bazalgette was given the commission to build an entirely new sewer system beneath the capital. Working at extraordinary scale, he laid 1,100 miles of street sewers feeding into 83 miles of intercepting sewers, constructing embankments along the Thames to carry them. The system he built, largely completed by 1875, reduced cholera deaths from thousands per year to almost zero within a generation. The Thames Embankments are a monument to the kind of unglamorous, large-scale public engineering that is easy to overlook because it works so completely.
On the 18th of November 1910, Black Friday: suffragettes marched on Parliament Square and were met with organised police violence, 300 women arrested, many assaulted. It was not an unusual day in a campaign that lasted decades, but it concentrated attention. The movement centred on London because Parliament was in London, and Parliament was what needed changing. When women over 30 won the vote in 1918, and all women over 21 in 1928, it was the product of decades of protest, imprisonment, hunger strikes, and organised political pressure — much of it focused on the streets and institutions of this city. Parliament Square still carries that history in its stones.
Between September 1940 and May 1941, the Luftwaffe dropped more than 18,000 tonnes of bombs on London. The city buried 30,000 of its dead, kept its Underground stations as shelters, and kept going with a composure that impressed the watching world and irritated the invaders. What followed the Blitz — the NHS founded in 1948, the welfare state, the post-war settlement — was not unconnected to the experience of a city that had endured collective suffering and drawn conclusions about collective responsibility. The political consequences of the Second World War were debated and decided in London, and their effects are still with us.
The City of London is among the oldest continuously operating financial centres in the world; the Bank of England has regulated the money supply since 1694. The development of modern insurance (Lloyd's), joint-stock companies, and eventually the global derivatives markets happened in these few square miles. London's financial sector remains a genuinely global operation — a fact that creates both prosperity and the particular tensions of a city where wealth distributes itself very unevenly across a metropolitan area of nine million people.
The fintech and tech sectors that have grown up around Shoreditch and the wider East End represent the latest chapter in a commercial tradition that predates the printed book.
London is also a city of 300 languages, of Notting Hill Carnival and the Proms, of the National Theatre and a thousand fringe venues, of the British Museum and the Tate Modern facing each other across the river. It has hosted the Olympic Games three times and continues to host an argument about what the city is for, who can afford to live in it, and whether its ambitions for growth are reconcilable with the lives of the people already here.
That argument is London too. It has been running, in one form or another, since Pepys was burying his cheese and wondering what would be left in the morning.
Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash