🇬🇧 United Kingdom · London and Southeast England
Few cities in the world pack in as much history, power and energy as London. Capital of the United Kingdom on the banks of the Thames, it was the heart of an empire that stretched across every continent and is today one of the most cosmopolitan metropolises on the planet: a city where thousand-year-old palaces and glass towers, Victorian markets and cutting-edge galleries, centuries-old pubs and restaurants from half the world all live side by side. It is enormous and sometimes overwhelming, but also orderly, walkable in patches and connected by one of the most famous metro systems in the world, the 'Tube'.
London is Big Ben chiming above Parliament, the guards in their bearskins outside Buckingham Palace, the ravens at the Tower of London, Tower Bridge opening over the river and the iconic red double-decker buses and phone boxes. But it is also the modernity of the London Eye, Tate Modern in an old power station, the bohemian districts of Camden and Shoreditch, the West End musicals, immense parks such as Hyde Park and museums — many of them free — among the best in the world. Each neighbourhood has its own character, and discovering them is part of the fun.
This guide covers the essentials of London with a practical, warm eye: what to see without going mad, how to get around by Underground and bus, how to make the most of the free museums, where to eat from fish and chips to the food markets, and how to organise day trips out of the city. London is expensive and big, but with good planning it gives you some of the most intense and memorable days of any trip around Europe.
London was born as Londinium, a settlement founded by the Romans around AD 47-50 on the banks of the Thames, at a strategic point for crossing the river. After the Roman withdrawal it passed through Saxon hands and suffered Viking raids, until, after the Norman conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror built the Tower of London and the city established itself as a centre of power. Through the Middle Ages it grew around the walled 'City' and Westminster, where the monarchy, the Abbey and, in time, Parliament settled. The Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed much of the medieval city, marked a turning point: after the fire, the architect Christopher Wren rebuilt dozens of churches and the imposing St Paul's Cathedral. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as capital of the British Empire and engine of the Industrial Revolution, London became the largest and most powerful city in the world, with its Victorian age of great public works, bridges, stations and the planet's first underground railway (1863). The twentieth century tested it: it suffered the German bombing of the Blitz in the Second World War, rebuilt itself and became a multicultural metropolis with the arrival of immigrants from all over the former empire. Today London combines that enormous historical legacy with a vibrant modernity. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political, economic and cultural heart of the country: London, from Roman Londinium to global capital, with Westminster and the Tower; Windsor Castle, a royal residence; and Oxford and Cambridge, the two oldest universities in the English-speaking world.
Read the history of London and Southeast England →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
London's history as a city begins with the Romans. After the invasion of Britain ordered by the emperor Claudius in AD 43, the Romans founded around AD 47-50 a settlement called Londinium on the north bank of the Thames, at a strategic point where the river was narrow enough to bridge and, at the same time, deep enough for ships to come up from the sea. That combination — bridge and port — would be the key to the city's destiny for two thousand years.
Londinium grew quickly as a trading centre and a hub of Roman roads. In AD 60 or 61 it suffered a brutal blow: Queen Boudica, leading the Iceni tribe in revolt against Roman rule, sacked and burned the city. But Londinium was rebuilt and prospered, becoming the capital of the Roman province of Britain, with a forum, a basilica (one of the largest buildings north of the Alps), temples, public baths and a defensive stone wall put up around the end of the second or the beginning of the third century, whose line would mark the limits of the City for centuries.
When the Roman Empire went into crisis and the legions left Britain at the beginning of the fifth century, Londinium emptied out and lost its urban splendour. The great Roman city was left largely deserted, but it had left behind for good the foundations — and the name — of the future London.
After the Roman withdrawal, the Anglo-Saxons who settled in Britain founded, outside the old walled city, a new trading settlement called Lundenwic, to the west (in the area of today's Covent Garden and the Strand). It was a prosperous trading port that flourished between the seventh and ninth centuries. However, the Viking raids of the ninth century put it in jeopardy: the Danes came to occupy the area, until King Alfred the Great of Wessex recovered it around 886 and moved the settlement back inside the Roman walls, easier to defend, refounding what was called Lundenburh, the seed of the future City of London.
Over the following centuries, London grew in importance, disputed between English and Danish kings. But the real centre of royal power began to shift a little upriver, to Westminster ('the west minster'), where King Edward the Confessor had a great abbey and a royal palace built in the middle of the eleventh century. That separation between the City (the commercial centre) and Westminster (the political and religious centre) would mark London for ever.
The decisive year was 1066. After the death of Edward the Confessor, the Norman duke William defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings and conquered England. William the Conqueror was crowned in the newly finished Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, beginning a tradition of coronations that continues today. To dominate the city and its people, he ordered an imposing stone fortress built on the banks of the Thames: the White Tower, the core of the future Tower of London.
During the Middle Ages, London established itself as the largest and richest city in England, although it was not yet the fixed official capital (the court moved around). The City, within its walls, was organised as a powerful commercial centre governed by its own merchants and guilds (the 'livery companies'), which won important liberties and privileges from the kings. The figure of the Lord Mayor of London and the City corporation were born in this period, and the city knew how to negotiate its autonomy: Magna Carta itself, in 1215, confirmed London's liberties.
The medieval city was a hive of activity: the Thames port received goods from all over Europe, the old London Bridge — covered in houses and shops — was the only crossing over the river, and cathedrals, churches and monasteries dotted the landscape, presided over by the old medieval St Paul's Cathedral. But it was also a time of catastrophe: the Black Death that swept Europe reached London in 1348-1349 and killed an enormous share of its population, returning in waves for centuries.
While the City prospered as an economic centre, Westminster consolidated its role as the seat of power. The royal palace and the Abbey developed there and, in time, the institutions of government and justice, and Parliament began to meet there. That double identity — the City of money and Westminster of power — defined London's structure and explains why they are still two distinct 'cities' within the metropolis today.
Under the Tudor dynasty (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), London went through an enormous transformation. Henry VIII's break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries changed the urban and economic landscape, freeing up large church properties. Under Queen Elizabeth I, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the city flourished: trade expanded across the seas, merchant companies were founded and an unprecedented cultural splendour emerged. On the south bank of the Thames, in Southwark, the theatres where William Shakespeare triumphed opened, such as the famous Globe Theatre, and London became a great centre of English-language literature and drama.
The seventeenth century brought political turbulence (the civil war and the execution of King Charles I in 1649, outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall) and, above all, two consecutive catastrophes. In 1665 the Great Plague of London broke out, the last great epidemic of bubonic plague, which killed some 100,000 people, a quarter of the population. And the following year, in September 1666, the Great Fire of London, which started in a bakery on Pudding Lane, burned for several days through most of the medieval city inside the walls: it destroyed thousands of timber houses, dozens of churches and the old St Paul's Cathedral.
The rebuilding after the fire shaped a new London. The architect Christopher Wren led the reconstruction of dozens of churches and, above all, designed the new St Paul's Cathedral, with its famous dome, completed in 1710 and turned into a symbol of the city. Although no completely new town plan was ever put into effect, the city rose from the ashes more solidly built, with brick and stone houses instead of timber.
Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, London became the largest, richest and most powerful city in the world, capital of the greatest empire that had ever existed. Overseas trade, the banking of the City and, above all, the Industrial Revolution sent its growth soaring. The population exploded: from a few hundred thousand at the beginning of the eighteenth century, London passed a million inhabitants around 1800 and six million by the end of the nineteenth century, becoming an unprecedented megalopolis.
The Victorian era (the long reign of Queen Victoria, 1837-1901) left an indelible mark. Great railway stations, bridges, museums, parks and monuments were built. In 1851, the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park showed the world Britain's industrial might, and the profits paid for the great museums of South Kensington. In 1863 the Metropolitan Railway opened, the world's first underground railway: the London Underground had been born. Icons went up such as the new Palace of Westminster with Big Ben (after the fire of 1834) and, in 1894, Tower Bridge.
But that dazzling London had a dark reverse, portrayed by writers such as Charles Dickens: wretched slums, overcrowding, pollution, thick fog (the famous 'smog') and deep social inequality. In 1888, the Jack the Ripper murders in the East End shocked the world and reflected the poverty of those districts. Victorian London was, at once, the capital of progress and of the most extreme social contrast.
The twentieth century tested London as never before. During the Second World War, the city suffered the Blitz: the German air force's bombing campaign between 1940 and 1941, and again with the V1 and V2 flying bombs at the end of the war. Night after night, Londoners sheltered in Underground stations while much of the city — the docks, the East End, the City — was left in ruins. The image of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral intact among the smoke and flames became a symbol of British resistance. The so-called 'Blitz spirit' (the fortitude of the civilian population) stayed in the national memory.
The post-war years brought reconstruction and a deep social transformation. From 1948, with the arrival of the ship Empire Windrush, large-scale immigration began from the colonies and former colonies of the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, Africa and other parts of the Commonwealth. That immigration changed the face of London for good, making it one of the most multicultural and diverse cities on the planet, with neighbourhoods and communities from all over the world, and enriching its food, its music and its everyday life.
The London of the second half of the twentieth century was also that of the 'Swinging London' of the 1960s (the music, the fashion, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones), of the redevelopment of the abandoned docks into the modern financial district of Canary Wharf, and of great events such as the millennium (with the London Eye and the Millennium Dome) and the 2012 Olympic Games, which regenerated the east of the city. Today London is one of the great financial and cultural capitals of the world, a global metropolis where two thousand years of history live alongside a skyline in constant change.