Introducing the city

With a population of just under eight million, and stretching more than thirty
miles at its broadest point, London is by far the largest city in Europe. It is also
far more diffuse than the great cities of the Continent, such as Rome or Paris.
The majority of the London’s sights are situated to the north of the River
Thames, which loops through the centre of the city from west to east, but there
is no single predominant focus of interest, for London has grown not through
centralized planning but by a process of agglomeration - villages and urban
developments that once surrounded the core are now lost within the amorphous
mass of Great London. Thus London’s highlights are widely spread, and visitors
should make mastering the public transport system, particularly the
Underground (tube), a top priority.
One of the few areas of London witch is manageable on foot is Westminster and
Whitehall, the city’s royal, political and ecclesiastical power base for several
hundred years. It’s here you’ll find the National Gallery and the adjacent
National Portrait Gallery, and a host of other London landmarks: Buckingham
Palace, Nelson’s Column, Downing Street, the House of Parliament and
Westminster Abbey. From Westminster it’s a manageable walk upriver to the
Tate Gallery, repository of the nation’s largest collection of modern art as well
as the main assemblage of British art. The grand streets and squares of
Piccadilly, St James’s, Mayfair and Marylebone, to the north of Westminster,
have been the playground of the rich since the Restoration, and now contain the
city’s busiest shopping zones: Piccadilly itself, Bond Street, Regent Street and,
most frenetic of the lot, Oxford Street.
East of Piccadilly Circus, Soho and Covent Garden form the heart of the West
End entertainment district, where you’ll find the largest concentration of
theatres, cinemas, clubs, flashy shops, cafes and restaurants. Adjoining Covent
Garden to the north, the university quarter of Bloomsbury is the traditional
home of the publishing industry and location of the British Museum, a
stupendous treasure house that attracts more than five million tourists a year.
Welding the West End to the financial district, The Strand, Holborn and
Clerkenwell are little-visited areas, but offer some of central London’s most
surprising treats, among them the eccentric Sir John Soane’s Museum and the
secluded quadrangles of the Inns of Court.
A couple of miles downstream from Westminster, The City – the City of
London, to give it its full title – is at one and the same time the most ancient and
the most modern part of London. Settled since Roman times, it became the
commercial and residential heart of medieval London, with its own Lord Mayor
and its own peculiar form of local government, both of which survive, with
considerable pageantry, to this day. The Great Fire of 1666 obliterated most of
the City, and the resident population has dwindled to insignificance, yet this
remains one of the great financial centres of the world ranking just below New
York and Tokyo. The City’s most prominent landmarks nowadays are the hi-
tech offices of the legions of banks and insurance companies, but the Square
Mile boasts its share of historic sights, notably the Tower of London and a fine
cache of Wren churches that includes the mighty St Paul’s Cathedral.
The East End and Docklands, to the east of the City, are equally notorious, but
in entirely different ways. Impoverished and working-class, the East End is not
conventional tourist territory, but to ignore it is to miss out the crucial element
of the real, multi-ethnic London. With its abandoned warehouses converted into
overpriced apartment blocks for the city’s upwardly mobile, Docklands is the
corner of the down-at-heel East End, with the Canary Wharf tower, the
country’s tallest building, epitomizing the pretensions of the Thatcherite dream.
Lambeth and Southwark comprise the small slice of central London that lies
south of the Thames. The South Bank Centre, London’s little-loved concrete
culture bunker, is the most obvious starting point, while Southwark, the city’s
low-life district from Roman times to the eighteen century, is less known,
except to the gore-addicts who queue up for the London Dungeon.
In the districts Hyde Park, Kensington and Chelsea you’ll find the largest park
in Central London, a segment of greenery which separates wealthy West
London from the city centre. The museums of South Kensington – the Victoria
& Albert Museum, Science Museum and Natural History Museum – are a must,
and if you have shopping on your London agenda you may well want to
investigate the hive of plush stores in the vicinity of Harrods, superstore to the
upper echelons.
Some of the most appealing parts of North London are clustered around
Regent’s Canal, which skirts Regent’s Park and serves as the focus for the
capitals’ trendiest weekend market, around Camden Lock. Further out, in the
chic literary suburbs of Hampstead and Highgate, there are unbeatable views
across the city from half-wild Hampstead Heath, the favorite parkland of
thousands of Londoners. The glory of Southeast London is Greenwich, with its
nautical associations, royal park and observatory. Finally, there are plenty of
rewarding day trips along the Thames from Chiswick to Windsor, a region in
which the royalty and aristocracy have traditionally built their homes, the most
famous being Hampton Court Palace and Windsor Palace.

London. Historical buildings

Political, religious and regal power has emanated from Westminster and
Whitehall for almost a millennium. It was Edward the Confessor who
established Westminster as London’ s royal and ecclesiastical power base, some
three miles west of the real, commercial City of London. In the nineteenth
century, Whitehall became the “heart of the Empire”, its ministries ruling over a
quarter of the world’s populations.
The monuments and buildings from this region include some of London’s most
famous landmarks – Nelson’s Column, Big Ben and the House of Parliament,
Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, plus the city’s two finest
permanent art collections, The National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. This is a
well-trodden tourist circuit for the most part - hence the council’s decision to
reinstate the old red phone boxes – with few shops or cafes and little street life
to distract you, but it’s also one of the easiest parts of London to walk round,
with all the major sights within a mere half-mile of each other, linked by two of
London’s most triumphant avenues, Whitehall and The Mall.
Despite being little more than a glorified, sunken traffic island, infested with
scruffy urban pigeons, Trafalgar Square is still one of the London’s grandest
architectural set-pieces. London’s Trafalgar Square, the city’s official center,
features some of England’s most treasured historic monuments. The square was
laid out between 1829 and 1841 on the site of the old royal stables and is lined
on its northern side by the National Gallery. The gallery, begun in 1824, boasts
one of the finest art collections in the world, with work from every major
western artist from the 15th through the 19th centuries. The square’s dominating
landmark is a pedestal supporting a statue of Lord Nelson, the British naval hero
who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Trafalgar in Spain, in 1805.
Nelson’s Column, raised in 1843 and now one of the London’s best-loved
monuments, commemorates the one-armed, one-eyed admiral who defeated
Napoleon, but paid for it with his life. The statue which surmounts the granite
column is triple life-size but still manages to appear minuscule, and is coated in
anti-pigeon gel to try to stem the build-up of guano. The acanthus leaves of the
capital are cast from British cannon, while bas-reliefs around the base are from
captured French armaments. Edwin Landseer’s four gargantuan bronze lions
guard the column and provide a climbing frame for kids to clamber over. If you
can, get here before the crowds and watch the pigeons take to the air as Edwin
Lutyens’fountains jet into action at 9am.
Keeping Nelson company at ground level, on either sides of the column, are
bronze statues of Napier and Havelock, Victorian major-generals who helped
keep India British; against the north wall are busts of Beatty, Jellicoe and
Cunningham, more recent military leaders. In the northeast corner of the square,
is an equestrian statue of George IV, which he himself commissioned for the top
of Marble Arc, over at the northeast corner of Hyde Park, but which was later
erected here “temporarily”; the corresponding pedestal in the northwest corner
was earmarked for William IV, but remains empty.Taking up the entire north
side of Trafalgar Square, the vast but dull Neoclassical hulk of the National
Gallery houses one of the world’s greatest art collections. Unlike the Louvre or
the Hermitage, the National Gallery is not based on a former royal collection,
but was begun as late as 1824 when the government reluctantly agreed to
purchase 38 paintings belonging to a Russian émigré banker, John Julius
Angerstein.
St James’s Park, on the south side of The Mall, is the oldest of the royal parks,
having been drained for hunting purpose by Henry VII and opened to the public
by Charles II, who used to stroll through the grounds with his mistresses, and
even take a dip in the canal. By the eighteenth century, when some 6500 people
had access to night keys for the gates, the park had become something of a
byword for prostitution. The park was finally landscaped by Nash into its
present elegant appearance in 1828, in a style that established the trend for
Victorian city parks.
Today the pretty tree-lined lake is a favourite picnic spot for the civil servants of
Whitehall and an inner-city reserve for wildfowl. James I’s two crocodiles have
left no descendants, but the pelicans can still be seen by the lake, and there
ducks and Canada geese aplenty. From the bridge across the lake there’s a fine
view over Westminster and the jumble of domes and pinnacles along Whitehall.
Even the dull façade of Buckingham Palace looks majestic from here.
The graceless colossus of Buckingham Palace, popularly known as “Buck
House”, has served as the monarch’s permanent London residence only since
the accession of Victoria. It began its days in 1702 as the Duke of
Buckingham’s city residence, built on the site of a notorious brothel, and was
sold by the duke’s son to George III in 1762. The building was overhauled for
the Prince Regent in the late 1820s by Nash, and again by Aston Webb in time
for George V’s coronation in 1913, producing a palace that’s about as bland as
it’s possible to be.
For ten months of the year there’s little to do here, with the Queen in residence
and the palace closed to visitors – not that this deters the crowds who mill
around the railings all day, and gather in some force to watch the “changing of
the guard”, in which a detachment of the Queen’s Foot Guards marches to
appropriate martial music from St James’s Palace (unless it rains).
Whitehall, the broad avenue connecting Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square,
is synonymous with the faceless, pi-striped bureaucracy charged with the day-
to-day running of the country. Since the sixteenth century, nearly all the key
governmental ministries and offices have migrated here, rehousing themselves
on an ever-increasing scale, a process which reached its apogee with the grimly
bland Ministry of Defence building, the largest office block in London when it
was completed in 1957. The original Whitehall Palace was the London seat of
the Archbishop of York, confiscated and greatly extend by Henry VIII after a
fire at Westminster forced him to find alternative accommodation. Little
survived the fire of 1698, caused by a Dutch laundrywoman, after which, partly
due to the dank conditions in this part of town, the royal residence shifted to St
James’s.
The palace of Westminster, better known as the Houses of Parliament, is
London’s best-known monument. The “mother of all parliaments” and the
“world’s largest building” – or it was claimed at that time- it is also the city’s
finest Victorian building, the symbol of a nation once confident of its place at
the centre of the world. Best viewed from the south side of the river, where the
likes of Monet and Turner set up their easels, the building is distinguished
above all by the ornate, gilded clock tower popularly known as Big Ben, which
is at its most impressive at night when the clock-face is lit up.
The original Westminster Palace was built by Edward the Confessor in the first
half of the eleventh century, so that he could watch over the building of his
abbey. It then served as the seat of all the English monarchs until a fire forced
Henry VIII to decamp to Whitehall. The Lords have always convened at the
palace, but it was only following Henry’s death that the House of Commons
moved from the abbey’s Chapter House into the palace’s St Stephen’s Chapel,
thus beginning the building’s associations with the parliament.
Oxford - The towers and spires of Oxford lure students and travelers from
around the world to south central England. Situated near the confluence of the
Rivers Thames and Cherwell, this site was settled by Saxon traders in the 10th
century. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which logs the country’s history from the
beginning of the Christian era, first mentions Oxford in 912.
This historic English city seats the 12th-century University of Oxford, the
country’s first university and one of the world’s most esteemed places of
learning. Rhodes scholars, outstanding foreign students selected from the
Commonwealth of Nations, the United States, South Africa, and Germany,
study at the University of Oxford for two years. Today this university enrolls
more than 13,000 students and has more than 35 individual colleges.
The heart of Oxford, known as Carfax, derives its name from the Latin
quadrifurcua, which means “four-forked”. This refers to the four points of the
compass—the direction of the city’s main streets. Walls surrounding ancient
Carfax helped the city withstand attacks by the Danes during the 10th and 11th
centuries. By the mid-13th century Oxford had become a major educational
center, and the university attracted leading scholars and students from
throughout Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Books :
• “London, The Rough Guide” – Rob Humphreys
• “Georgian London” – Summerson J.
Software :
• “AA Interactive Britain & Ireland”
• “Microsoft Encarta Interactive World Atlas 2000”