Since its founding as little more than a Roman fort, London slowly prospered and expanded. Such is its resilience, it survived the Norman invasion, the Dark Ages and the Black Death in the following 1,500 years.
It’s greatest period of prosperity started during the time of Henry VIII, in the sixteenth century, who — despite his shortcomings as a loyal husband — did lay the foundations for massive global expansion in Britain’s influence and empire.
A fortunate by-product of Henry’s split with the Roman Catholic Church was the arrival in England of Protestant Huguenot refugees, from the nearby continent of Europe. England has always benefited from the skills of its immigrants and none more so than from the Huguenots, who brought with them their secret skills in silk weaving. Silk cloth was a highly prized product and proved to be a massive boost for the trade and wealth of the country — and London, in particular.
The increasing population and wealth lead to a great deal of new building. Being an island gave Britain an extra layer of protection from invasion. So London was able to expand well beyond the confines of the original walled city without fear, and this it did.
Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII, sought to curb this expansion without effect. Indeed her own encouragement to empire building in the form of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, only gave new impetus to London’s wealth and power.
Due to the restrictions on building new property, many of the existing properties were bizarrely extended upwards, with floors which jettied beyond the original walls. This lead to situations where the upper floors of houses almost touched, forming archways over the streets, with the occupants able to lean out of the upper floor windows and shake hands with the people opposite!
After the civil war and the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell eventually relinquished his position as Lord Protector and England once more had a monarch, in the person of Charles II. During his reign, there was a dramatic flowering of science, lead by Sir Isaac Newton.
London also experienced the Great Fire of London, in 1666, which destroyed most of the wooden buildings in the old city of London. It also, conveniently, destroyed the last vestiges of the plague, which had decimated the area the previous year.
Sir Christopher Wren, who designed and built St Paul’s Cathedral, drew up a grand design for the replacement of the whole area, to avoid the unsanitary conditions that had lead to the plague. However, such a dramatic transformation would require wholesale acquisition of the land in the area and, due to the difficulty in tracing all the various owners, time ran out and new buildings were put up. These were of more fireproof materials, mainly brick, but still following the higgledy piggledy lines of the old city. Thus the organic charm of the old city of London was not swept away by Wren’s grand vision, and still survives to delight visitors in the 21st century.
Until the seventeenth century, London had grown on east-west lines, along the River Thames, using the river itself as the main highway. What minor inconvenience the River Thames presented to north-south travel was overcome by the provision of ferries, both in the London Bridge area and up river at Putney. However, as London expanded to the north and south, the need for swift transport across the river became apparent and this period was the start of the building of London’s many bridges.
During the Georgian period, London — by then the center of a growing worldwide empire — expanded even more dramatically, with many of the fine and sought after terraces so admired today, being built very rapidly.
As the latest in technology — the railway — developed, there was pressure to keep these away from the center of London. This is why present day London is ringed with railway termini, which originally stopped at the then edge of the city.
With no major railway line cutting right through the city, it was left to the ingenuity of engineers to provide an alternative. This they did by digging a cutting to take the railway, which was then covered over and built on. Thus was created the world’s first underground (or subway) railway. This technique of “cut and cover” as it was known, proved such a success other lines were created in the same fashion. When the railways reached the outer areas of London, they were permitted to rise to ground level, which was considerably cheaper. This, in turn, led to the springing up of new suburbs, clustered around the new railway lines, which offered fast, comfortable and safe transport into the center of London.
Finally, “the commuter” was born.
The most popular suburbs were to the west of London, as they were downwind from the smoke and pollution arising from the city. In the 1930s many cleaner, new “high tech” industries — many American owned, such as Gillette and Firestone — sprang up along The Great West Road, originally the old coaching road to Bath, the ancient Roman city in the far west. Also at this time, several movie studios were built in the western suburbs of London.
World War two came right to the center of London with almost nightly raids by heavy bombers of the Nazi Luftwaffe. These were targeted mainly on the east of London, where the mighty Pool of London docks and factories were situated. Many of these devices were incendiary bombs, designed to maximize damage by starting massive fires. There is a famous picture of St Paul’s Cathedral, surrounded on all sides by raging infernos, yet unscathed and defiant against the very worst that could be thrown at London.
Rebuilding and expansion after the war, lead to the creation of the Green Belt: a notional belt of undeveloped land surrounding London to limit further expansion. With it’s “green lungs” — the massive parks right at its center — the green belt sourrounding it, plus the thousands of trees within, London, despite being one of the largest cities in the world, still retains a village feel, with each former village, now swallowed up by the great metropolis, still retaining much of their own particular character and charm.
In the 1950s the pollution, particularly from thousands of household coal fires, coupled with London’s famous autumnal fogs, combined to create “smog”. The government brought in a Clean Air Act, to force the use of processed coal — called smokeless fuel — which cleared up the smog.
In the 21st century of its existence, London is not resting on its laurels and is, right now, busy re-inventing itself. It already boasts the world’s busiest airport, to the west and is hard at work regenerating the eastern area of London ready to stage the Olympic Games in 2012.