Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The City currently stretches from Temple Bar in the west to the Tower of London in
the east - administrative boundaries only slightly larger than those marked by the
Roman walls and their medieval successors. However, in this Square Mile (as the City is
often called) you'll have to dig hard to find leftovers of London's early days: four-fifths
of the area burnt down in the Great Fire. What you see on the ground is mostly the
product of three fairly recent building phases: the Victorian construction boom; the
rapid reconstruction that followed the Blitz; and the building frenzy that began in the
late1980s, and which has since seen over half the City's o ce space rebuilt.
The biggest change of all, though, has been in the City's population . Until the
eighteenth century, the vast majority of Londoners lived and worked in or around the
City; nowadays, while more than 350,000 commuters spend Monday to Friday here,
only ten thousand actually live here, mostly cooped up in the Barbican complex. The
result of this shift is that the City is only fully alive during of ce hours, with many
pubs, restaurants and even some tube stations and tourist sights closing at the weekend.
11
Fleet Street
Fleet Street offers one of the grandest approaches to the City, thanks to the view
across to Ludgate Hill and beyond to St Paul's Cathedral, but it's best known for
its associations with the printed press and particularly the newspaper industry
(see box, p.158).
Temple Bar
Temple Bar , at the western end of Fleet Street, is the latest in a long line of structures
marking the boundary between the City of Westminster and the City of London.
It began as a simple chain between two posts, but a Wren-designed triumphal arch
stood here by the 1670s. The heads of executed traitors were displayed on the arch
until the mid-eighteenth century - one could even rent a telescope for a closer look.
Then, in 1878, the arch was removed to ease tra c, exiled for over a century to a
park in Hertfordshire, only to be re-erected recently near St Paul's (see p.163). The
current monument, topped by a winged dragon, marks the spot where the sovereign
must ask for the Lord Mayor's permission to enter the City, a tradition that began
when Elizabeth I passed through on her way to St Paul's to give thanks for the defeat
of the Spanish Armada.
St Dunstan-in-the-West
186a Fleet St • Mon-Fri 9.30am-5pm • T 020 7405 1929, W stdunstaninthewest.org • ! Temple or Blackfriars
The church of St Dunstan-in-the-West , with a distinctive neo-Gothic tower and lantern,
from the 1830s, dominates the top of Fleet Street. To the side is the much earlier clock
temple, erected in 1671 by the parishioners in thanks for escaping the Great Fire,
which stopped just short of the church; inside the temple, the legendary British giants
Gog and Magog, in gilded loincloths, nod their heads and clang their bells on the hour.
THE CORPORATION
The one unchanging aspect of the City is its special status, conferred on the area by William
the Conqueror to win favour with London's powerful burghers, and extended and rea rmed
by successive rulers ever since. Even today, with its own Lord Mayor, its Beadles, Sheriffs and
Aldermen, its separate police force and its select electorate of freemen and liverymen, the
City is an anachronistic, one-party mini-state. It's run by the City of London Corporation
( W cityoflondon.gov.uk), an unreconstructed old-boys network whose medievalist pageantry
camouflages the very real power and wealth that it holds. Its anomalous status is all the more
ba ing when you consider that the area was an early bastion of British democracy: it was the
City that traditionally stood up to bullying sovereigns.
 
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