The City is where London began. Long established as the financial district, it currently stretches from Temple Bar in the west to the Tower of London in the east — administrative boundaries that are only slightly larger than those marked by the Roman walls and their medieval succession this Square Mile (as the City is sometimes referred to) you’ll few leftovers of London’s early days: four-fifths of the area burnt Great Fire of 1666. Rebuilt in brick and stone, the City gradually as London swelled westwards, though it has maintained its financial heartland, home to banking, insurance and other services. What you see on the ground is mostly the product of three fairly recent building phases: the Victorian construction boom of the latter half of the nineteenth century. The overzealous post war reconstruction following the Blitz; and the building frenzy that began in the 1980s, and which has seen nearly fifty percent of all office space in the city rebuilt.
When you consider what has happened here, it’s amazing that anything has survived to bear witness to the City’s 2000 year history. Wren’s spires still punctuate the skyline here and there, and his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral remains one of London’s geographical and tourist pivots. At the eastern the Tower of London, begun shortly after the Norman conquest survives. Other relics, such as the medieval alleyways, Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire synagogue and church, are less conspicuous, and even the finding the more modern attractions of the Museum of London and the Barbican arts complex. It’s also worth checking out some of that has shot up within the Square Mile since the 1980s, Lloyd’s Building, a mould-breaking modern construction Rogers, now somewhat overshadowed by the equally unconventional Gherkin building by Norman Foster.
Perhaps the biggest change of all, though, has been in the City’s population. Up until the eighteenth century the vast majority of Londoners lived and the City; nowadays, while more than 300,000 commuters spend the best part of Monday to Friday here, only 5000 people remain at night and weekends most of them cooped up in the upmarket apartments complex. The result of this demographic shift is that the City is only alive during office hours, making weekdays by far the best time to visit Many pubs and restaurants and even some tube stations and tourist sights close down at weekends!
The one unchanging aspect of the City is its special status, conferred on the area by William the Conqueror, to appease the powerful burghers, and extended and reaffirmed by successive monarchs and governments ever since. Nowadays, with its own Lord Mayor, its Beadles, Sheriffs and Aldermen, its separate police force and its select electorate of freemen and liverymen, the City is an anachronism of the worst kind. The Corporation of London ( www.corpoflondon.gov.uk ), which runs the City like a one party mini-state, is an unreconstructed old-boy network whose medievalist pageantry camouflages the very real power and wealth that it holds the Corporation owns nearly a third of the Square Mile (and several tracts of land elsewhere in and around London). Its anomalous status is all the more baffling when you consider that the area was once the cradle of British democracy: it was the City that traditionally stood up to bullying sovereigns. For a great hotel in the city of London at fantastic rates see this page from Online Discounted Hotels Ltd. | | | |
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