London [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION London is one of the world's great cities. Older than Amsterdam, Berlin or Moscow and roughly contemporary with Brussels, Geneva and Lisbon, it has been taking shape for 2,000 years. The Roman legions of the Emperor Claudius, looking for a place to ford the River Thames, built a bridge at Southwark in AD 46 and setded on the north bank close to the site of present-London Bridge. Within RivifeW years, "Londinium" r Hou SHad become, according to Tacitus, "a celebrated centre of commerce". ^ During their 400-year occupation the Roman invaders built a forum, a governor's palace, temples and merchants' houses, enclosing their 330-acre setdement inside a great defensive wall. This area grew to just under a square mile, and is known as the City of London. It is the oldest and smallest of the 33 administrative districts that make up today's metropolis and, paradoxically, the most modern to look at. To the west of the City or the "Square Mile" lies Westminster, the royal and political heart of England for 1,000 years. A younger but no less important district, it was designated a city in its own right in 1900, a fact that frequently confuses visitors who do not immediately realise that London comprises two cities and 31 boroughs. London has no logical pattern. A lack of symmetry has resulted in a patchwork urban sprawl. Parts of the wall that enclosed the Roman city are still visible beside towering 20th-century concrete and glass structures. The straight roads of Londinium and the medieval cat's- cradle of winding alleys survive in outline only because commercial considerations dictated that the City be rebuilt hurriedly after the Great Fire of 1666 reduced 436 acres to a mass of rubble and smouldering timbers. Well-proportioned houses of brick and stone replaced the half-timbered medieval dwellings but these, in turn, and their Georgian and Victorian successors, were destroyed during the Second World War. Almost half of the churches designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St Paul's Cathedral, in the aftermath of the Great Fire were saved or reconstructed, and today in a City where God met Mammon and lost, their graceful spires are an elegant contrast to an increasing number of soaring office towers. 13