The City of London
The History
The outpost which would become London first appears in history as a small Roman military storage depot during the invasion of Britain by the Romans, which began in A.D. 43. It was ideally located as a trading center with the continent and soon developed into an important port. It had already become the official Roman headquarters in Britain, when Boudica, the Queen of the Iceni, a native British tribe, burnt it to the ground in A.D. 61 in the course of her bloody revolt against Roman rule. It was rebuilt by the year 100, and first appears as "Londinium" in Tacitus's Annals. It rapidly became both the provincial capital and the administrative, commercial, and financial center of Roman Britain. Its population by the middle of the third century numbered perhaps 30,000 people, a number which grew in fifty years to nearly twice that number. They lived in a city with paved streets, temples, public baths, offices, shops, brick-fields, potteries, glass-works, modest homes and elaborate villas, surrounded by three miles of stone walls (portions of which still remain) which were eight feet thick at their base and up to twenty feet in height.
During the course of the fourth century, however, as the Roman Empire began to collapse, Roman “Londinium” fell into obscurity as its protective Legions withdrew; history records no trace of it between 457 and 600. During that time, however, it gradually became a Saxon trading town, eventually quite a big one. In the same century Christianity was introduced to the city (St. Augustine appointed a bishop, and a cathedral was built).
London is made of 32 boroughs but the City of London is not one of them. The local authority for the City, the City of London Corporation, is unique in the United Kingdom, and has unusual responsibilities for a local authority in Britain, such as police authority for the City. It is headed by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, a separate (and much older) office to the Mayor