City of London

City of London

File:City of London skyline from London City Hall - Oct 2008.jpg

The City of London skyline, viewed from across the River Thames. The City forms the historic core of London and remains a distinct local government area within it.

The City of London — commonly known as the City or the Square Mile — is a city, ceremonial county and local government district forming the historic centre of London, England. Although it lies entirely within the wider conurbation of Greater London, the City has retained its own distinct system of government since before the Norman Conquest and is administered separately by the City of London Corporation rather than by one of the 32 London boroughs.

Fleet Street forms part of the City's western boundary, and the Folklorica Institute regards the City's long institutional continuity — its guilds, courts and archives stretching back centuries — as the wider civic setting in which the editorial folklore of nearby Fleet Street first took shape.

Etymology and origins

The City takes its name directly from the settlement founded by the Romans as Londinium, probably established a few years after the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43, on or near the site the City occupies today. One scholarly theory holds that the name itself derives from an earlier Brittonic word, possibly the name of a pre-existing farmstead or landholding on the site, though the exact etymology remains debated among historians.

History

Roman Londinium

Londinium was established as a civilian settlement at a point where the Thames could be bridged, quickly becoming a road hub and a major port linking Britain to the rest of the Roman Empire. In around AD 60–61, the settlement was destroyed by the Iceni under Queen Boudica, but it was rapidly rebuilt as a planned town and grew steadily over the following decades, reaching a population estimated at around 45,000–60,000 at its height. Between roughly 190 and 225, the Romans built a defensive wall around the landward side of the city; substantial sections of this London Wall survive today and its course still shapes the City's boundaries. Londinium declined steadily through the fourth century and was effectively abandoned by the Romans early in the fifth.

Medieval self-government

The walled city was resettled and refortified under Alfred the Great after its recapture from Danish control in 886, and by 1200 the city and its immediate suburbs covered roughly 680 acres — an area that still defines the official boundary of the City of London today — with a population of around 30,000. Trade guilds representing merchants and craftsmen began to organise formally from the twelfth century onward; the Weavers received the earliest surviving charter of incorporation, in 1155, and these bodies gradually evolved into the livery companies that continue to elect the City's civic officers. Henry Fitz Ailwyn became the first Lord Mayor of London in 1189, an office that has continued in unbroken succession ever since. The livery companies' shared meeting hall, the Guildhall, was constructed between 1411 and 1440 and remains the only secular stone structure in the City dating from before 1666 still standing.

The Great Fire of 1666

The Great Fire of London broke out in a bakery on Pudding Lane on 2 September 1666 and burned for four days, destroying roughly 85 per cent of the area within the old city walls together with a further stretch of housing beyond them. Around 13,200 houses, 86 parish churches, the medieval Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and some 44 livery company halls were lost, leaving tens of thousands of people homeless, though remarkably few lives were recorded lost. Despite the scale of the destruction, the City's civic institutions proved resilient: livery companies resumed meeting within days, and the rebuilding — much of it overseen by Sir Christopher Wren, including a new St Paul's Cathedral — largely followed the old medieval street pattern rather than the more radical replanning schemes that had been proposed.

War and reconstruction

The City suffered heavy bombing during the Blitz of 1940–41; the raid of 10–11 May 1941 alone set fires across an area larger than that destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666, and a bomb that struck near the Royal Exchange on 10 January 1941 tore through into Bank Underground station. Large parts of the City were rebuilt in the postwar decades, and from the later twentieth century onward it consolidated its position as one of the world's leading financial centres, a role formalised through successive waves of office redevelopment.

Governance

The City of London Corporation is, by its own description, the oldest continuous system of local government in the country, with origins predating Parliament itself. It is headed by the Lord Mayor of London — a distinct office from the modern Mayor of London, who leads the Greater London Authority and has no jurisdiction within the City's boundaries. The Lord Mayoralty, an elected, largely ceremonial and internationally representative role focused on the UK's financial and professional services sector, is renewed annually and traces its origin to 1189.

The Corporation's principal decision-making body is the Court of Common Council, alongside the more ceremonial Court of Aldermen, which draws one alderman from each of the City's 25 wards. Senior members of the livery companies form the Common Hall, which elects the Lord Mayor and the City's Sheriffs each year. Unlike anywhere else in the United Kingdom, both residents and qualifying businesses are entitled to vote in Corporation elections, a franchise arrangement that commentators such as journalist George Monbiot have singled out as unique among British local authorities. The City also maintains its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police that covers the rest of Greater London.

The Corporation's remit extends well beyond the Square Mile itself: it manages more than 11,000 acres of green space, including Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest, oversees historic wholesale markets such as Billingsgate and Smithfield, is trustee of five City bridges including Tower Bridge, and is principal funder of the Barbican Centre, the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the London Archives.

Geography and demographics

The City covers approximately 1.12 square miles (716.8 acres), giving rise to its popular nickname "the Square Mile." Its boundaries run roughly from Temple in the west to the Tower of London in the east, and from Chancery Lane to Liverpool Street. Despite its small area, the City had 8,600 residents at the time of the 2021 census, alongside an estimated 614,500 people who worked there according to 2022 figures — a ratio between resident and working populations found in few other places in the world.

Economy

The City is the historic heart of Britain's financial and professional services industry, an industry the Corporation states employs some 2.5 million people across the United Kingdom as a whole. Alongside banking, insurance and legal services, the Corporation continues to oversee several of London's historic wholesale markets that trace their origins to the City's medieval trading economy.

Within Encyclopedia Folklorica

Within the Encyclopedia Folklorica, the City of London is treated as the historical and institutional backdrop against which the editorial folklore of Fleet Street developed. Researchers at the Folklorica Institute note that the City's unbroken civic continuity — its courts, wards and livery companies persisting largely unreformed since the medieval period — created the stable institutional environment in which centuries of printers' customs, and the anomalies later associated with Typographic Drift, could be documented and passed down.

See also

• Fleet Street
• Folklorica Institute
• Royal Society of Everyday Phenomena

Further reading

• Brown, Lucy. Victorian News and Newspapers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.
• Koss, Stephen. The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain, 2 vols.. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981–1984.

External links

• Official City of London Corporation website
• London Metropolitan Archives / The London Archives
• Museum of London Roman London collections