• Location: On the Thames River, southeast England
• Language: English
• Currency: Pound sterling (£), made up of 100 pence (p)
  • Notes: £5, £10, £20 (rarely used: £1, £50, £100)
  • Coins: 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1, £2 (rarely used: £5)

  Should you tip? In England's restaurants, there is sometimes a "discretionary" service charge added to the bill. When there is no extra charge, tips of 10%-15% are expected, unless the service is particularly poor. Bartenders at pubs do not expect a tip, but are happy to receive one. Some tour guides expect a tip, though it is not obligatory. Taxi drivers generally get a tip of about 10%; many simply round the fare up to the nearest £.

• Airports: Five airports serve the greater London area.
  • London Heathrow Airport, located 15 miles (24 km) west of Central London, is one of the world's busiest airports.
  • London Gatwick Airport, located 28 mi (46 km) south of London, and 24.8 miles (40 km) north of Brighton, serves the most routes in Europe.
  • London Stansted Airport, a single runway airport, 30 miles (48 km) north-east of London. It is the center for low-priced and commuter airlines in England.
  • London Luton Airport is located about 35 miles (56 km) north of London.
  • London City Airport, located in the London Borough of Newham in East London, primarily serves the London financial district.

London was established by the Romans in the 1st century CE and was called Londinium. It went through a series of conquests, and in 1066 the Normans selected Westminster as their center of government. London became one of Europe's largest cities, and — even after being struck by Black Death in the 14th century, by plague and the Great Fire of London in the 17th century, and by German bombs during World War II — it has remained one of the world's most influential cities.

Today, London, with its population of more than seven million, is the capital of England and the United Kingdom and a center of business, finance, politics, culture, arts and style, as well as a busy port city. Greater London stretches over both sides of the Thames River and consists of 32 boroughs that surround the City of London — a one-square-mile area that includes the old city of London and what constitutes the commercial hub of today's London. A region of immigrants, some 30% of London's population is foreign born.

Be sure to wander through the city's parks, including Hyde Park, St. James's Park, Kensington Gardens and The Green Park.

London has something for everyone: parks, museums, theater, architecture, boat rides, double-decker buses, churches, palaces — the list goes on and on. A London Pass allows entrance to 55 of the most popular tourist sites, plus discounts at restaurants, theaters and shops.

Following is a small sampling of some of London's most popular tourist sites:

• Buckingham Palace — London home of Britain's sovereigns; it was originally built by the duke of Buckingham in 1703. Adjacent to St. James Park, this is a favorite spot to see the Changing of the Guard.
• British Museum — The museum was created by an act of Parliament. Its most popular exhibits include the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin (or Parthenon) Marbles and antiquities from India, Greece, China, Egypt, Rome, etc. The British Library is a part of the museum.
• Westminster Abbey — originally the abbey church of a Benedictine monastery; almost every English queen or king since William the Conqueror (except Edward V and Edward VIII) has been crowned here. Eighteen of the monarchs, plus statesmen, poets, writers, scientists and other distinguished personages have been buried in Westminster Abbey. Check out the Poets' Corner and the tombs of Chaucer, Browning and Tennyson.
• Tower of London — a fortress on the north bank of the River Thames. In the middle ages it was a royal residence and later it became a prison and the site of many executions. It now houses a museum with a collection of medieval armor, plus the crown jewels.
• London Eye — At 135 m/443 ft tall, this is the world's largest observation wheel. It is located on the South Bank of the Thames, between Westminster and Hungerford Bridges; the wheel takes 30 minutes to make a full revolution and affords a breathtaking view of the city.
• Madame Tussauds Wax Museum — Hobnob with Britney, Atatürk, George, Diana, Oprah and the pope — or at least with their amazing wax likenesses.
• Big Ben and Houses of Parliament — also called Westminster Palace. This is where the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It is situated on the north bank of the Thames, in Whitehall. The Jewel Tower is right across the street.
• The National Gallery — Located on Trafalgar Square, the gallery houses an enormous collection of European paintings from about 1250-1900, including works by Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gainsborough, Turner and Van Gogh. Around the corner is the National Portrait Gallery, including a collection of portraits of famous and infamous British subjects from the Tudors to present day.
• Shakespeare's Globe Theatre — Catch a performance of one of Shakespeare's plays in this beautifully reproduced replica of the original theater in which his plays were produced.
• Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms — Opposite St. James's Park in central London, in the basement of the treasury building, are the preserved War Rooms, where maps and documents still hang on the wall, and the rooms remain as they were furnished during World War II. The Churchill Museum allows you to walk chronologically through Winston Churchill's life, with pictures, documents and artifacts on display.
• Imperial War Museum — a collection of military weapons, vehicles and memorabilia from Britain's wars.
• Museum of London — 2000 years of London's history, from prehistoric to modern times. Feel what it was like to be in London during WWII, see London during the Great Fire,...
• Sherlock Holmes Museum — The famous address of 221B Baker St. is actually located at 239 Baker St. Holmes' living quarters, filled with his artifacts, books, pipes and all the other items that are so familiar from the books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Kew Gardens — There are over 30,000 types of plants from all over the world on the grounds and in the six glasshouses strewn over the 121 hectares (nearly 300 acres) on the Thames River, between Kew and Richmond, in southwest London.
• Covent Garden — It's where Eliza Doolittle hung out; the square holds a beautiful fruit, vegetable and garden market, as well as boutique shops of all kinds. The Royal Opera House, St. Paul's Church and London Transport Museum are located here. The award-winning street performances may feature a juggler one day, a string quartet the next; an acrobat in the afternoon, an opera singer in the evening.
• West End and Piccadilly Circus — New York has Broadway and Times Square; London has the West End and Piccadilly Circus. The key theater and entertainment district for the city, the West End is also a retail center. It includes the theaters, cinemas and restaurants of Leicester Square, Soho and Covent Garden, and the shops of Oxford, Regent and Bond Streets.

Though London is known as a foggy, rainy town, it is actually one of Europe's driest capitals. Though it rains often, the rainfall is generally light. Temperatures are moderate, with the hottest month being July (average temperature: 13-23° C/56-73° F) and the coldest being January (average temperature 2-8° C/35-46° F)

Summer months are usually the most crowded in London; if you want to avoid long lines in the tourist centers, it is best to visit January-April.

Prices are subject to change.

• Transport for London — all about getting around London
• LondonNet guide to attractions
• Visit London
• This is London, entertainment guide
• British Airports Authority

Dictionary: Lon·don  (lŭn'dən)

The capital and largest city of the United Kingdom, on the Thames River in southeast England. Greater London consists of 32 boroughs surrounding the City of London, built on the site of a Roman outpost named Londinium. Its growth as an important trade center dates from 886, under the rule of Alfred the Great. Since the Elizabethan period (1558–1603) London has dominated its country's political, economic, and cultural life. Population: 7,520,000.

For more information on London, visit Britannica.com.

The first London ballet performances were given by French and Italians during the 17th and 18th centuries, though two English men, John Weaver (dancer, choreographer, teacher, and writer) and John Rich (impresario and mime artist) were also influential personalities within the dance scene. Rich presented M. Sallé and her brother in London in 1725 and London's taste for ballet was further whetted by A. Vestris and Noverre performing highly successful seasons at the King's Theatre and Drury Lane, as well as by Didelot's work at the King's Theatre (1796-80). However, efforts to establish an English academy of dancing by the English ballet master James Harvey D'Egville were unsuccessful and the domination of foreigners continued with Blasis' appointment as ballet master at the King's Theatre (1830-40), M. Taglioni's debut in 1830, and Perrot's appointment as ballet master at Her Majesty's Theatre (1842-8) under the direction of B. Lumley. Here Perrot created Pas de quatre (1845) for Taglioni, Cerrito, Grisi, and Grahn and London became briefly one of the most active ballet centres in the world. After Lumley's resignation, however, ballet was allowed to slide at Her Majesty's and performances continued in the programmes of music halls, such as the Alhambra and Empire where K. Lanner and Genée were the dominant dance personalities. The arrival of Russian-based companies at the beginning of the 20th century and regular seasons by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes provided an important new stimulus to British ballet, and during the 1920s and 1930s London saw the establishment of seminal schools and companies by Rambert and de Valois, as well as the foundation of the Camargo Society and various short-lived companies like the Markova-Dolin company and Tudor's London Ballet. Between these, the first solid generation of English dancers and choreographers was nurtured. After the war de Valois's Sadler's Wells Ballet moved to Covent Garden, to become the Royal Ballet in 1956. In the late 1960s the foundation of the London Contemporary Dance School and Theatre, and Ballet Rambert's switch to a modern repertoire, opened up a new modern dance scene. With the founding of international festivals, such as London's Dance Umbrella in 1978, the proliferation of small and middle-scale companies, and the emergence of venues capable of programming a wide range of styles, London has become one of the most diverse and cosmopolitan dance cities in the world.

The most salient feature of London's experience in the early modern period was the enormous growth of its population. From approximately 70,000 inhabitants in 1500, it grew to 200,000 by 1600, to 400,000 by 1650, to 575,000 by 1700, and had reached 900,000 by 1800. Its position in the tables of European urban centers rose from sixth place in 1500 to third in 1600 (after Naples and Paris), and it outstripped Paris to reach the top position soon after 1650. Whereas it contained about 2 percent of the English population in 1500, by 1700 it had reached around 10 percent, and this level was sustained through the eighteenth century. Mortality levels were extremely high in London: indeed they deteriorated after the disappearance of plague in the later seventeenth century because the capital acted as a reservoir of infections. For much of the eighteenth century tuberculosis, typhus, and smallpox were major killers. It was only from the 1760s that mortality conditions began to improve. This meant that the city's growth could only be sustained by a constant flow of migrants who came from every corner of England and Wales (and increasingly from Scotland and Ireland and the European mainland, too). By 1700 London needed probably about 8,000 newcomers a year. Only something between 20 and 30 percent of Londoners had been born in the city. And because London acted as a revolving door, not only receiving people, but sending them back to the provinces, as many as one in six of the national population had experience of London life by 1700.

Economic Change

The cities that grew most rapidly in early modern Europe were capitals or ports. London was both. In the early sixteenth century London already accounted for 75 percent of the country's international trade, but it was dangerously dependent on the export of the key staple of woolen cloth to the Antwerp entrepôt in return for luxury goods. By 1600 the pattern of trade was already diversifying, as the disruptions to trade with the Low Countries encouraged London merchants to seek direct access to goods they had previously obtained there. The merchants of London returned to the Mediterranean in the 1570s, began voyaging to the East Indies in 1600, and began to develop trade with the Americas in the early seventeenth century. London entered a new phase of import-led growth, and reexports, particularly of colonial products like tobacco, became increasingly important. By 1700 London handled 80 percent of the nation's imports, 65 percent of its exports, and 85 percent of its reexports.

As a capital city London benefited from the increasing centralization of government. As the royal court became more sedentary and also asserted its monopoly of patronage, the landed elites came to see a London residence as essential to the maintenance of their power and influence, contributing to the beginning of the London winter season from 1600 onward. Likewise, the huge increase in the volume of litigation in the central law courts brought more people to the capital on legal business. This in turn contributed to the concentration of the professions in the capital: by 1730 London contained at least a quarter of the country's solicitors and attorneys. The development of the fiscal military state from the 1690s onward brought about both an increase in the size of the government apparatus (as well as annual Parliaments) and a huge expansion in the financial services sector as London acquired the key banking and insurance institutions.

London's role as capital city and port contributed to its role as center of manufacturing and shopping. The residence of the elites brought an immense demand for luxury goods in its wake, while the import trades spawned spin-off industries like sugar refining and silk weaving. Whereas in 1500 the economy had been dangerously dependent on the state of the cloth trade, the broadening of the manufacturing base contributed to the long-term resilience of the city economy. London's manufactures became increasingly heavily capitalized, entailing a diminution in the role of the self-employed artisan and a growth in larger enterprises. London was not, however, to be the cradle of the industrial revolution, and in the later eighteenth century the proving ground of industrial innovation lay in the provinces. The high labor costs associated with the capital meant that London came to concentrate on the finishing of industrial goods and on the luxury trades, but it remained the largest manufacturing center in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Likewise, the enormous demand represented by the concentration of people in London encouraged the precocious development of specialist retailing facilities. Already in the 1490s foreign travelers marveled at the wealth of the goldsmiths' shops in Cheapside; in the early sixteenth century moralists bemoaned the proliferation of haberdashers' shops selling fripperies; in 1568 London acquired its first shopping mall in the galleried arcades of Sir Thomas Gresham's Royal Exchange, a model for other purpose-built retailing emporia in the West End in the seventeenth century.

The concentration of the social elites in the capital for the London season contributed to the proliferation of entertainments and the increasing commercialization of leisure. One of the earliest manifestations of this was the amphitheater playhouses (three were built in 1576–1577) with capacities of upwards of 1,500. Although subject to the constant strictures of the moralists and the fitful regulation of a nervous government, the theaters became an established feature of the London social scene. Commercial concerts began in the 1670s; although aristocratic patronage was critical in attracting high-class composers and vocal and instrumental performers, there was enormous public interest in the performances, the rehearsal for Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks (1749) having an audience of twelve thousand. Citizens had long found recreation in the fields about the city, but physical expansion meant that it was necessary to create designated recreational promenades, beginning with Moorfields in 1608, but soon supplemented by the more fashionable Lincoln's Inn Fields and St. James' Park. By the eighteenth century the metropolitan area was studded with a variety of pleasure gardens, their differential pricing ensuring that the classes would not have to mingle too much. Much cultural and social exchange, of course, continued to take place in the city's drinking establishments: by the 1730s London boasted at least 200 inns, 500 taverns, 6,000 alehouses, and 550 coffeehouses.

Society and Government

The two foci of court and port affected the social geography of the city. The City proper, the area under the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and aldermen covering what is now known as the "square mile," was, although not socially uniform in character, increasingly dominated by the commercial elites. This process was reinforced after the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed 87 parish churches, 13,200 houses, and many public buildings. Although it proved impossible to realize the ambitions for a comprehensive redesign of the city's layout, the post-Fire rebuilding changed its face, as brick replaced timber and lath, and many overcrowded tenements were not rebuilt. Meanwhile the landed elites, many of whom had maintained residences in the City in the later Middle Ages, migrated westward toward Westminster, which constituted a separate focus for growth. The West End was characterized by a large number of speculative housing developments, usually regular terrace rows in wide streets and squares, many of them sponsored by the aristocracy themselves. By contrast, the eastern suburbs were dominated by the port, the miles of dockyards generating a huge demand for casual (and often seasonally unemployed) labor, and a variety of industrial activity, including shipbuilding, as well as the processing of imported raw materials. The northern and eastern suburbs were markedly poorer (with large numbers of subdivided properties and a high level of multiple occupancy) than the City and the West End, though it would be wrong to draw the distinctions too strongly. The presence of the elites in the West End generated an enormous demand for services and manufactures, meaning that within a few yards of the fashionable squares dominated by the aristocracy and gentry were alleys teeming with the poor. In the City the commercial core was centered on the key shopping thoroughfares like Cheapside and places of mercantile association like the Royal Exchange, but there were areas of marked poverty, particularly in the insalubrious riverside parishes.

The scale of growth meant that the traditional City was soon engulfed by the expanding suburbs. By the later seventeenth century three-quarters of the capital's population resided in areas beyond the control of the Lord Mayor and aldermen. Unlike Paris, where there was a much stronger match between topographical and administrative boundaries, there was no attempt to integrate the suburbs with the governmental structures of the City. The suburbs, all of which experienced in various degrees the social problems of poverty and petty crime attendant on population growth, were governed by overlapping manorial and parochial authorities. Nevertheless the breakdown in order was by no means as great as one might think. London was a relatively well policed capital. From Recorder William Fleetwood in the Elizabethan period to Henry Fielding in the 1750s, chosen magistrates worked closely with the central government to coordinate suburban policing. Parish vestries, particularly in the western suburbs, elaborated the poor law into a bureaucratic mechanism for controlling the poor. Local communities increasingly turned to Parliament for the powers they needed to address local problems. From 1700 there was a proliferation of improvement commissions responsible for street improvement, lighting, and sewerage. A host of voluntary organizations supplemented the work of parish vestries in the relief and schooling of the poor.

Throughout the period London evoked contrasting responses from contemporaries. Protestants might celebrate it as a model godly commonwealth when contrasting the piety of its citizens with the state of rural religion, but they would alternately condemn it as a model of Babylonian depravity when considering its social problems and the greed of its leading citizens. Economic commentators might marvel at the wealth of the City and its increasing dominance over its Continental rivals, but they might also claim that it was strangling the provincial centers. The reality, however, seems to have been that London handled the problems of urban growth more successfully than comparable centers and developed a positive economic and cultural relationship with its hinterland.

Bibliography

Archer, Ian W. The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1991.

Clark, Peter, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500–1840. Oxford and New York, 2001.

George, M. Dorothy. London Life in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1966.

Griffiths, Paul, and Mark S. R. Jenner, eds. Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2000.

Inwood, Stephen. A History of London. London, 1998.

Merritt, J. F., ed. Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2001.

Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. London, 1994.

Rappaport, Steve. Worlds within Worlds: The Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.

Spence, Craig. London in the 1690s: A Social Atlas. London, 2000.

Thrupp, Sylvia. The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500. Chicago, 1948.

—IAN W. ARCHER

Capital of Britain, located in southeastern England on both sides of the Thames River; officially called Greater London; a financial, commercial, industrial, and cultural center and one of the world's greatest ports.

• Many buildings of central London were destroyed or damaged in air raids, called the Blitz (short for blitzkrieg), during World War II.
• London is the home of Westminster Abbey, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the Tower of London, and the University of London.

The country code is: 44
The city code is: 20 7

Local Time: Dec 1, 5:59 PM

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