Londinium burned, rebuilt, and never stopped rewriting itself
London, capital of England and the United Kingdom, held about 9.14 million people in 2025, with a Western European-leading metro near 15.4 million along the tidal Thames. Romans founded Londinium around AD 47; Boudica’s Iceni razed it about AD 61 before a planned city rose again.
By the second century Roman London held roughly sixty thousand souls and displaced Colchester as Britannia’s chief city in AD 100. After Rome’s early-fifth-century collapse the walls emptied, though life lingered near St Martin-in-the-Fields until about 450. Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic grew west of the ruins; Alfred refounded trade inside the old walls in 886. William I took the crown at Westminster Abbey on Christmas 1066 and raised the Tower of London; William II began Westminster Hall in 1097.
Medieval numbers swung hard: about 18,000 in 1100, nearly 100,000 by 1300, then roughly a third lost to the mid-fourteenth-century Black Death. The Great Plague of 1665–66 killed some 100,000—about a fifth of the city—before the 1666 Great Fire cleared timber streets. Wren’s St Paul’s finished in 1710. From about 1831 to 1925 London was the world’s largest city. The Underground became the first urban rapid-transit network; cholera peaks in 1848 and 1866 spurred a modern sewerage system.
Greater London since 1965 joins thirty-three local authorities under the Greater London Authority. Over fifty universities enrolled more than 500,000 students in 2023. More than three hundred languages are spoken. Landmarks run from the Tower and Westminster Abbey to Trafalgar Square; it is the only city to host three Summer Olympics—1908, 1948, and 2012. Bronze Age bridge timbers upstream of Vauxhall date to 1750–1285 BC, hinting at deep prehistoric use of the same river bend.
Source: London
