Greater London is not officially a city, and the City sits outside it
Most people call it London, but Greater London holds no royal city status. Only two places inside it, the City of London and Westminster, do. Stranger still, the ancient City, with a government dating to the 12th century, is a separate ceremonial county from the 32 boroughs that surround it.
The administrative area covers 1,572 square kilometres and had an estimated 9,089,736 residents in 2024. It is almost wholly urban, though five boroughs contain sizeable stretches of the Metropolitan Green Belt. The Thames defines its shape, entering near Hampton in the west and leaving downstream of Dagenham; many of its tributaries now run in culverts as part of the sewer network, and the flat riverside land climbs to low hills such as Hampstead.
London-wide elected government is surprisingly young. The London County Council arrived in 1889, but its county covered only the urban core, while the built-up area, police district and transport network sprawled far beyond. The London Government Act 1963 fixed that, creating Greater London on 1 April 1965 from Middlesex, the old County of London and slices of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey. The phrase itself was in use much earlier, for the Metropolitan Police District and for a road programme drawn up between 1913 and 1916.
After a 1998 referendum, the Greater London Authority, the London Assembly and a directly elected mayor were created in 2000. The Assembly can amend the mayor's annual budget only with a two-thirds majority. The authority's headquarters moved from City Hall in Southwark to The Crystal in Newham in January 2022. Boundaries have barely shifted, though Farleigh went to Surrey and Knockholt to Kent in 1969; North Ockendon is the only part lying beyond the M25.
Industrialisation swelled the population, and London was the most populous city on Earth until New York overtook it in 1925. Numbers peaked at 8,615,245 in 1939; an estimated 7,753,600 lived there in mid-2009. The wider metropolitan area holds between 12 and 13 million people depending on definition, and the region's density, 4,761 people per square kilometre, exceeds every other British region at least tenfold. Kensington and Chelsea, Kingston and Greenwich carry the honorific Royal Borough.
Source: Greater London
