Defining the metropolis
London is my muse. I often find, when I have the faintest adumbration of a story floating around in my head, that the plot itself is extremely vague. Instead I have a district of London in mind as a setting, and a couple of characters beginning to form.
Because London is so large, and so diverse, its districts themselves become characters in my mind, rather than just backdrops. I think of Waterloo or Elmers End and images are splashed onto my mind’s canvas, loosely formed images that don’t constitute anything interesting enough to retain readers’ attention for more than a few pages. So, yeah, plot — that’s the thing I need to put more effort into.
But it’s fun to just put some thoughts down on London, the place. It defies easy distinction, and its residents can never unanimously decide where it even begins and ends, much less how to describe it. Is London even a city?
In Britain, the term “city” traditionally only refers to conurbations that have been officially granted city status. This means that a relatively small town could in fact be called a city, whilst a much larger urban centre down the road could be stuck with the less impressive “town” status. To this day, towns occasionally bid for city status, when the queen decides to hold a competition and award the honour to a given number of winners.
It’s all very archaic and twee. Of course, to most people around the world, “city” denotes a large, or very large, town. And more people in the UK are now referring to large towns as cities, even if official city status has not been granted. However, in England in particular, a lot of people are very conservative and traditional, and like to think of their areas as quaint county towns, even when said towns have long since shed any visual or demographic pretence of being such places.
But what about London? Or rather, Greater London, which is what we must concern ourselves with in this discussion. The distinction is made because to many people, “London” and “Greater London” are not the same thing, and yet, if you digest any media output that refers to “London” in a story, the event being described could have happened anywhere from Enfield to Croydon, from Hillingdon to Havering.
What are the different ways in which we can define London, then? I can think of the following options.
London is Greater London, there is no difference between the two. This definition is the one used by politicians, the media, and about half the population of zones 4–6. It’s easy to imagine the ambition behind it. Faced with growing competition from huge cities around the globe, the population of “inner London” — the old London County Council boundary — is insufficiently impressive, at a mere 3.5 million. We need to boast of our 8 million population to keep ourselves at the forefront of the conversation on the world’s premier cities.
Under this definition, London is a city. It is a single urban entity stretching for 607 square miles. Ask anyone living in Islington whether they consider Romford to be London, and they will derisively snort No, it is not, before taking another sip of latte. Ask anyone living in Romford whether Romford is in London, and they will probably say Nah it’s Essex, innit, before bellowing Free for a pahnd at nobody in particular. And isn’t what people living there feel the ultimate determining factor? Well, tell that to Cornish separatists, who, much to their chagrin, are firmly English, as far as everybody else in the world is concerned. This definition of London has governance, the emergency services, and the 020 phone number on its side.
London is inner London. The bits that make up Greater London are actually nothing to do with London whatsoever. They are towns in the Home Counties.
This is the definition that many if not the vast majority of people living in zones 1–3 will give you. This is equally true of the born and bred cockneys and rudeboys, and the people from Norwich and Guildford who can be found scanning the pages of Timeout for the newest trendy rooftop bar selling Special Brew in bean cans.
Royal Mail have dropped the old county names from addresses, which means that “Sutton, Surrey” will find its way less and less onto envelopes. But the cold hard reality of a postcode remains. When I lived in Deptford, I wrote “50 XXX Road, London, SE8 XXX”. When I lived in Croydon, I wrote “50 XXX Road, Croydon, CR0 XXX”. The postcode puts Croydon, Ilford, etc, on equal footing with London, in that they are towns significant enough in their own right to command their own postcode.
The difficulty with this definition is that, using Croydon again as the example, nobody in Surrey would class Croydon as Surrey, and in no other discernible way does the town sit within the borders of Surrey. So if London rejects Croydon, and Surrey rejects Croydon, does that mean that counties themselves are a thing of the past?
London is a city within the county of Greater London. When you think about it, if there is such a divide between London and the towns around its perimeter, then perhaps it should be recognised out of respect for those towns as much as deference to the cool kids in Peckham and Hackney.
Greater London is unquestionably an administrative county, there can’t be much debate about it when a London Mayor presides over all of it, the Metropolitan Police arrest people all over it, and a unified “London” transport network connects all of it.
But is Greater London a city? It’s never been granted the queen’s coveted city status, after all. In fact, the City of London and the City of Westminster are two separate official cities, and there are no more within the whole metropolis.
That is another of our rather archaic idiosyncrasies, however, and not many people would maintain that the City and Westminster are separate, or even that boroughs like Newham and Haringey are not part of the same city as Bloomsbury and Pimlico. Where the separation begins, people argue, is at the southern extremities of the inner south London boroughs, the northern extremities of the inner north London boroughs, etc.
So perhaps the way of satisfying the “London is Greater London” and the “London is inner London” arguments is to define Greater London as a county; a contiguously urbanised county with no greenbelt between its towns and cities, but a county nonetheless.
In this idea, London is inner London, Croydon is a separate city. Sutton, Barking, Enfield and so on are separate towns or cities. Bearing in mind that each of the outer London boroughs is home to its own postcode (with sporadic exceptions and overlaps), and boasts a population in the hundreds of thousands, there is an argument that, archaic city status notwithstanding, each of the outer London boroughs (tending, as they do, to feature a large town at the centre with its own suburbs spreading outwards) constitutes a city in its own right.
A county of contiguous cities, with the mighty London at its core. That’s a rather impressive idea, and one that seems to placate people on both side of the London vs Greater London divide. I would conclude that this is the most truthful definition of Greater London, one that means an honest comparison can be made between Greater London and similar conurbations such as the West Midlands and Greater Manchester.
