Independently London

Most of London was originally part of the county of Middlesex, but London gradually gobbled it up, and and nearly all of what was once Middlesex is now in London.

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A source of perpetual confusion to foreigners is the fact that the City of London is not the whole of London, but a tiny enclave inside it.

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Woolwich is very old. It’s been settled since the Iron Age, before the Romans built Londinium. Its name suggests that in Anglo-Saxon times it was a trading place for wool.

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Westminster was once an island at an important ford across the River, but the name originally referred only to the Abbey.

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Wandsworth is the only metropolitan borough to have lost bits when it was transformed into a larger London borough of the same name in 1965.

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From Bow bells to jellied eels, you can’t beat a good old bit of Cockney tradition, the heart and soul of London’s culture and identity.

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In population terms, Stoke Newington (“Stokey” to its friends) was London’s smallest metropolitan borough.

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Though the area we call Stepney nowadays is quite small, it was once a manor that covered most of what’s now the East End.

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It was in the 1950s that London’s Indian population really began to grow, with further influxes in the 1960s and 1970s, often from Africa rather than from India itself.

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