London, United Kingdom

London city, capital of the United Kingdom. It is oldest of the world’s great cities—its history spanning nearly 2 millennial—and one among the foremost cosmopolitan. By far Britain’s largest metropolis, it is also the country’s financial, transportation, and cultural centre.

London is situated in southeastern European nation, lying astride the watercourse Thames some fifty miles (80 km) upstream from its body of water on the North Sea. In satellite photographs the metropolis will be seen to sit down succinctly in a very inexperienced Belt of open land, with its principal ring highway (the M25 motorway) rib around it at a radius of concerning twenty miles (30 km) from the town centre. The growth of the built-up space was halted by strict urban planning controls within the mid-1950s. Its physical limits more or less correspond to the body and applied mathematics boundaries separating the metropolitan county of national capital from the “home counties” of Kent, Surrey, and Berkshire (in dextrorotary order) to the south of the watercourse and at the north Buckingham-shire, Hertfordshire, and Essex . The historic counties of Kent, Hertfordshire, and Essex extend in space on the far side the current body counties with an equivalent names to incorporate substantial components of the metropolitan county of national capital, which was shaped in 1965. Most of Greater London south of the Thames belongs to the historic county of Surrey, while most of larger London north of the Thames belongs traditionally to the county of Middle sex. Area larger London, 607 square miles (1,572 square km). Pop. (2001) Greater London, 7,172,091; (2011 prelim.) Greater London, 8,173,941.

Character of the city

If the border of the metropolis is well defined, its internal structure is immensely sophisticated and defies description. Indeed, London’s defining characteristic is AN absence of overall kind. It is physically a polycentric city, with many core districts and no clear hierarchy among them. London has at least two (and generally several more) of everything: cities, mayors, dioceses, cathedrals, chambers of commerce. In every side it functions as a compound or confederal metropolis.