6 - London: an introduction

Summary

BY the Norman Conquest, London was the primary centre of England's trade and industry, and subsequently became that of royal government. It developed into one of the leading cities of medieval Europe and its buildings were among the most distinguished in the country. Yet five centuries later, Elizabethan illustrations show that the city was still essentially confined within the much repaired Roman walls, with two or three suburbs immediately outside them, several religious foundations a little further away, and a scattering of dwellings lining the approach roads before quickly thinning to the fields of the countryside.

As with Paris, a never-ending sequence of demolition, rebuilding, and expansion has left little evidence of the medieval city, though we have a very considerable idea of what it was like. The same applies to the immediate suburbs, Southwark, Holborn, and Westminster. We know considerably less about the Strand and Charing, the area between the largest city in England and the centre of government, where many palaces and mansions were erected by those who needed to be close to the crown or to the seat of government.

The fire of 1666 and three centuries of commercial development have devastated medieval London and neighbouring Westminster, but it is not always appreciated that the inexorable expansion of the metropolis between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries also destroyed the less well-documented medieval buildings within a 15 mile radius of the city. Nothing remains of the early villages that used to edge the capital such as Kensington, Shoreditch, or Clapham, and little of those further afield at Kingston, Richmond, Greenwich, Harrow, and Uxbridge.