history-of-london-notes.html

‌

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Writer and journalist David Long has regularly appeared in The Times and the London Evening Standard, as well as on TV and radio. He has written a number of books on London, including Spectacular Vernacular, Tunnels Towers & Temples and the highly successful Little Book of London. He lives in Suffolk, England. Find him online at www.davidlong.info.

A Oneworld Book

First published by Oneworld Publications 2014

The moral right of David Long to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 978-1-78074-413-1
ISBN 978-1-78074-414-8 (eBook)

Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon Publishing

Oneworld Publications
10 Bloomsbury Street
London WC1B 3SR
England

‌

‌

‌Introduction

A great world city shaped by invasion, occupation and immigration, by upheavals as diverse as the Great Fire, the Blitz and the Big Bang, London may no longer be the largest metropolis – it lost the lead to New York a hundred years ago – but after two thousand years its history and its cultural heritage are unmatched.

Walk the streets today and it is hard to ignore what went before. The city may reinvent itself on an almost perpetual basis, the skyline always pricked by cranes and skeletons of steel, but everywhere there are clues to London’s past.

Besides Roman walls, Saxon fish traps and Norman churches, there are medieval markets that are still trading today, surviving fragments of great monastic foundations, timber-framed houses that against all odds managed to withstand the flames of 1666, and elegant streets and squares from the earliest exercises in practical town planning. Best of all, the vast majority of them can be visited, often at no charge, and on such visits readers will find this book to be a useful companion.

It is true that very little is known of the time before the Romans arrived, that their first settlement was more or less destroyed by Boudicca and her Iceni warriors, and that many later iterations of London lie buried deep beneath huge new developments in and around the Square Mile.1 But across the capital fresh discoveries are still being made all the time and, while much of the past remains elusive, Londoners and visitors to their city are genuinely spoilt for choice when setting out to explore its long riotous history.

Some of the most evocative relics of past centuries are still to be found complete in all their splendour, classed as world-famous buildings; others are just foundations or the outline of a place – or even, in the case of the great frost fairs, no more than contemporary accounts of what went on upon the frozen Thames. But from these remains emerges a picture of London that is as vibrant, as unique and as incredible as anything we see around the city today. Fast moving, always changing, and never standing still: it is a place we can relate to – and that we can literally reach out and touch.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Contents

‌Introduction