The history of London

The history of London is the story of a city that has been destroyed and rebuilt many times, growing larger each time. From a small Roman port on the Thames to today's global metropolis, here are the main stages.

Londinium, the Roman city

Around AD 47, a few years after the invasion of Britain, the Romans built a bridge over the Thames at the furthest point downstream where the river could be crossed, and around the bridge grew Londinium. Destroyed in 60-61 by the revolt of Queen Boudicca, it was rebuilt and became the provincial capital, with a forum, one of the largest basilicas north of the Alps, an amphitheatre (whose remains can be seen beneath the Guildhall) and, from the 2nd century, a circuit of walls, stretches of which survive near the Tower and the Barbican. With the end of Roman rule in the early 5th century, the city was almost abandoned.

The Middle Ages: the City and Westminster

The Anglo-Saxons settled outside the walls at Lundenwic, along today's Strand; after the Viking raids, Alfred the Great moved the city back inside the old walls in 886. In the 11th century King Edward the Confessor built an abbey and a palace at Westminster, a couple of kilometres upstream: so London's double identity was born, the merchants' City and the Westminster of king and government. William the Conqueror was crowned in the abbey on Christmas Day 1066 and built the Tower. The City won wide self-government, run by a Lord Mayor and the trade guilds, the livery companies, which still exist today.

Tudors and Stuarts: theatre, plague and fire

In the 16th century London grew rapidly to more than 200,000 people. Under Elizabeth I the south bank blossomed with theatres, including Shakespeare's Globe. The 17th century was a century of disasters: the civil war, the execution of Charles I outside the Banqueting House in 1649, the Great Plague of 1665 and, the following year, the Great Fire, which broke out in a bakery in Pudding Lane and in four days destroyed more than 13,000 houses and 87 churches. Rebuilding gave the City St Paul's Cathedral and Christopher Wren's churches, and streets of brick and stone instead of timber.

Capital of the empire

In the 18th and 19th centuries London became the centre of a global empire and the largest city on the planet, growing from about one million people in 1801 to more than six million in 1901. The West End's Georgian squares, the East End's docks, the railway termini, the world's first underground railway (1863), Joseph Bazalgette's sewers after the "Great Stink" of 1858 and the great South Kensington museums after the 1851 Exhibition all appeared. But it was also the city of the poverty described by Dickens, of slums and child labour.

The 20th century: wars and rebirths

During the Blitz of 1940-1941 German bombing killed tens of thousands of Londoners and destroyed whole districts, especially in the City and the East End. The post-war years brought reconstruction, the first modern council housing and the arrival of migrants from the Caribbean on the Empire Windrush in 1948, then from India, Pakistan and Africa. In the 1960s Swinging London made the city the world capital of fashion and music. The closure of the docks brought decline to the East End, but from the 1980s financial deregulation (the 1986 Big Bang) and the redevelopment of Docklands turned London into the great global financial centre.

The 21st century

In 2000 the Greater London Authority was created with an elected mayor. The 2012 Olympics regenerated the east of the city around Stratford. New skyscrapers have changed the skyline, and the Elizabeth line, opened in 2022, has redrawn the transport map. Today London, with about nine million people, faces the challenges of housing, inequality and post-Brexit life, but remains one of the most dynamic cities in the world.

See also famous Londoners, history of the United Kingdom and the London guide.

London on the map

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