Discover London

London is two ancient cities that grew together and then absorbed everything around them. The City of London, the square mile the Romans walled in the first century, is still a separate jurisdiction with its own police force and its own mayor, and it is where the banks are. Westminster, two miles upriver, is where the monarchy and Parliament settled, and it is why the government quarter and the financial one are in different places.

Everything else is villages that London swallowed, which is why the city reads as a collection of neighbourhoods rather than a single centre: Soho and Covent Garden for theatre and eating, Bloomsbury for the British Museum and the university, Shoreditch and Hackney east of the City, Notting Hill and Kensington to the west, and Greenwich downriver with the observatory and the meridian. The Thames divides north from south, and the south bank — Tate Modern, the Globe, the National Theatre — is now a continuous walk.

The national museums are free, which is unusual for a city this expensive, and the parks are large and genuinely used. Around three hundred languages are spoken here, more than in any other city on earth, and the food follows. The Underground is the oldest metro system in the world and the fastest way across the middle; the buses are better for seeing where you are going.