London

London

Once the world’s biggest city, and still Western Europe’s largest metropolis, London remains one of the continent’s greenest capitals, with more than 3000 parks, gardens, woods, wetlands, commons, heaths, nature reserves and leafy retreats punctuating the streets, belying its concrete jungle reputation. And for all the Big Smoke’s undeniable hubbub, it’s easy to escape the hustle, bustle, tarmac and tumult by exploring these hidden harbours of tranquillity, which range from epic parks to tiny unexpected urban oases, often linked by canal towpaths, tree-fringed footpaths, riverbank trails and waymarked walking routes.

Wildlife thrives in these verdant environments, and the city is home to hedgehogs, deer, badgers, foxes, squirrels, water voles, stoats, multiple species of bat, butterflies, moths and dragonflies. London is also one of Earth’s largest urban forests, with an estimated eight million trees inhabited by more than 300 bird species, who sing the sun up over the skyscrapers each morning. Permanent residents range from skylarks, robins, goldfinches, chiffchaffs, redwings and wood pigeons to kingfishers, kestrels and falcons. Rowdy ring-necked parakeets are new arrivals, while seasonal visitors include a wealth of waterfowl. More than 2000 years of human habitation has shaped London’s landscape, and strolling the streets permits a peek into the capital’s captivating past. Besides monuments to familiar figures, you’ll find touching tributes to less-famous heroes and maltreated misfortunates in places like Postman’s Park and the Cross Bones Graveyard. Look out too for London’s blue plaques, which celebrate the city’s incredible cast of actors, artists, writers, philosophers, politicians, musicians and sporting titans.

Home to more than nine million people, and destination of choice for 30 million annual visitors, Greater London covers 1500 sq km of the Thames Valley, an area once blanketed in forest and thinly populated by Bronze Age tribes. The first sizeable settlement was founded by the Romans in 47ad. Four years after the imperious Italians invaded, a trading port called Londinium was built on a bridgeable part of the river, near present-day London Bridge, where there’s been a crossing ever since. Camulodunum (Colchester) was the original capital of Britannia (Roman Britain), but after Queen Boudica’s warriors destroyed both cities during the ill-fated Iceni rebellion in 60–61ad, Londinium was rebuilt and rapidly grew. Within a century it was Britannia’s busiest trading centre, and by around 200 a wall protected the burgeoning base. The modern City of London (the ‘Square Mile’) lies within the Roman wall, sections of which still stand. The city survived attacks by Saxon pirates, but the Romans left Britain in 410, and Londinium wilted.

Anglo-Saxons soon established competing kingdoms, with London passing from the Middle Saxons (whose turf became Middlesex) to the East Saxons (Essex) before being swallowed by Mercia. Weirdly, they ignored the old walled city, but remains of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery have been unearthed at Covent Garden, along with evidence of habitation around Trafalgar Square. Christianity caught on in the 7th century, and the original St Paul’s was built in 604 (close to the current cathedral). Vikings sacked the city twice in the 9th century, and in 871 the Great Heathen Army occupied London. The ‘Danelaw’ covered most of the country until Alfred the Great of Wessex and his sons vanquished the Vikings and created the Kingdom of England. Winchester was the capital, but London grew anew. King Athelstan convened his Witan (‘council of wise men’) here, and Æthelred the Unready issued the Laws of London in 978. The Vikings returned with a vengeance in 1013; Sweyn Forkbeard’s forces overran the country and his son, Cnut the Great, became king of England, Denmark and Norway.

When Anglo-Saxon rule resumed in 1042, Edward the Confessor founded Westminster Abbey, where his successor, Harold Godwinson, was crowned in 1066. Ten months later, however, Harold was defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings. The Norman newcomers firmly established London as England’s capital. William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey and by 1078 he had built the White Tower (the Tower of London’s centrepiece). His son, William Rufus, established Westminster Hall, which survives in the Palace of Westminster, still Britain’s seat of government – a place of increasing importance after King John conceded some of the monarch’s absolute authority by signing the Magna Carta by the Thames at Runnymede in 1215.

The Black Death halved the population in the 14th century, but London soon became one of Europe’s most important economic centres, with the powerful Company of Merchant Adventurers of London launching in 1407. During the Reformation and Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, swathes of church land were seized and redistributed between the king and his cronies. Many of London’s largest green spaces – including Greenwich, Richmond, Hyde and Bushy Parks – became exclusive royal hunting grounds, and the later Enclosure Acts increasingly expelled ordinary people from the commonland that once sustained them.

Culturally, London blossomed during the English Renaissance under Elizabeth I with Shakespeare staging popular plays in theatres like The Globe, now faithfully recreated on South Bank. By the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when the coronation of James VI of Scotland as King James I of England and Ireland nominally united the British Isles, the capital’s population approached 225,000. London’s largest public square, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, opened in 1629, and Covent Garden was created soon after. The West End attracted aristocrats under Charles I, but the monarch’s quarrels with his powerful parliament resulted in the eruption of the English Civil War in 1642. London largely sided with Cromwell’s New Model Army, and on 30 January 1649, Charles was beheaded outside Banqueting House, now the sole surviving part of the Palace of Whitehall.

During the Interregnum period, po-faced Puritans banned theatre (along with Christmas and Easter festivities), but the arts flourished again after the Restoration in 1660. London was devastated by the Great Plague in 1665 and scorched by the Great Fire in 1666, but from the ashes the city was reborn. Christopher Wren sculpted the skyline from scratch, orchestrating the construction of St Paul’s Cathedral among many other buildings. The Royal Observatory was established in Greenwich, Piccadilly became popular with the wealthy and better building materials were used throughout.

After James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution (1688–89), the new Dutch king, William III, expanded London’s boundaries by relocating the royal residence to Kensington, where it remained until George III bought Buckingham House. The 1707 Act of Union merged the Scottish and English Parliaments (with the Acts of Union 1800 adding Ireland), making London the capital of the United Kingdom, the epicentre of the expanding British Empire and the principal beneficiary of the dawning Industrial Revolution.

For centuries London Bridge was the only central structure spanning the Thames, but in 1729 a temporary bridge was built in Putney, followed by Westminster Bridge (1750), Kew Bridge (1759), Blackfriars Bridge (1769), Battersea Bridge (1773) and Richmond Bridge (1777), creating an explosion of development along the south bank. Around 1800, London became the world’s first city with a million residents, and the capital continued to swell. New arrivals included Jews and Huguenots escaping religious persecution, and Irish fleeing a terrible famine Westminster’s Whig government had exacerbated with its laissez-faire policies. Evocatively described by Dickens, 19th-century London was a place of enormous wealth discrepancy, deprivation, disease and crime, with overcrowded slums and prison barges bobbing on a poisonously polluted Thames.

Dreadful sanitation led to deadly cholera and typhoid endemics until the infamous Great Stink of 1858 prompted the commissioning of an ambitious sewer system proposed, designed and delivered by civil-engineering genius Joseph Bazalgette, which saw the creation of Victoria, Chelsea and Albert Embankments. Other visionary Victorians recognised the value of verdant spaces, and several of London’s finest outdoor arenas opened in this era, including Victoria Park, Finsbury Park and Primrose Hill.

Over the next century, the public regained access to land long-held privately by privileged families, through benevolent donation (Waterlow Park), because it was purchased by local authorities (Highgate and Queen’s Woods, Holland Park), adopted by charities like the National Trust and London Wildlife Trust (Petts Wood, Sydenham Hill Wood), or fought for by community groups (Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest). The arrival of the railway in the 1830s and the London Underground (1863) further reshaped the city, enabling the mushrooming middle classes to decamp to leafy suburbs and commute to work.

London experienced Zeppelin air raids during WWI, but greater horror was unleashed by the Luftwaffe in WWII. Entire areas were bombed to oblivion during the Blitz, especially in the East End, where working-class residents had resolutely repelled the rise of British fascism between the wars. The shell-shocked population rebuilt the city, assisted by newcomers, including the Windrush generation from the Caribbean, who – despite facing discrimination on arrival (and, scandalously, official mistreatment more recently) – helped transform London into a modern multicultural metropolis, where you can find cuisine from every corner of the world and enjoy the culture and company of people from all over the planet. The city remains a progressive font of fashion, art and innovative ideas.

This guide explores Central and Greater London via 30 walks within the M25, encountering echoes of all these events. While some routes are relatively long, options always exist for shortening or dividing them into easier strolls. London’s transport system is excellent and highly interconnected; you’re never far from a tube or train station, bus stop or river pier, which will soon send you towards wherever you’d like to go within the capital, the country or the continent.