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Comment by adrianratnapala | Hacker News Reader

In the trove were nearly 400 rare wooden writing tablets, some of which still displayed legible letters, legal agreements, and financial documents. (Another site yielded shopping lists, party invitations, and a contract for the sale of a slave girl.)

What strikes me is the way the essential purpose of London, and especially central London, hasn't changed. Since the Romans, it has been a financial or commercial centre. And therefore a centre of wealth and partying.

Slave girls might no longer be sold there (at least not with paperwork), but London is the capital of contracts.

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CGP Grey's "The (Secret) City of London" are great videos on the topic of the City of London (vs. London)

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ROpIKZe-c

> What strikes me is the way the essential purpose of London, and especially central London, hasn't changed. Since the Romans, it has been a financial or commercial centre. And therefore a centre of wealth and partying.

Nitpick: The City of London is not particularly central, and City is what contains the remnants of old Roman Londinium. The article misleads there by leading with a picture from Piccadilly Circus which is pretty much in the middle of the heart of London, while most of the digs the article talks of are happening in City, which is east of the centre.

City borders on the centre, and has a few tourist attractions, but you can live in London for years and never have a reason to go there unless you work for a bank etc.

It is specifically City of London that was the undisputed financial centre (now that role is shared with Docklands, even further East). It's like world to itself compared to the rest of London (especially as City even has a unique governing model where corporations are assigned votes).

> Nitpick: The City of London is not particularly central

It is if that's where you go most of the time. I only rarely go west. Mayfair was once described as a nice village on the outskirts of London

You've got the City of Westminster and the City of London, where London is in the east. I guess this why we end up with east end and west end to refer to parts of the city.

And there is the a bias: the West End is all about decadent entertainment and a fun night out. While the East End is about a fun night in watching a TV show about common folk.

That's fine for you, but it doesn't change the point at all, which is that for most people, City is far from what they'd consider the centre. That Mayfair was on the outskirts a couple of hundred years ago is not particularly relevant. Startig in the late 18th century, Charing Cross[1] has increasingly been considered the centre, even occasionally being used as an official marker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross

The city is pretty central as far as I see it. Although I agree for shopping, touristing and (perhaps) dining, the centre is more westish; there are good historical reasons why such places have names like Westminster and the West End.

In terms of modern London though, I take it as defined by the M25, and on that scale, the everything from Greenwich to White City is pretty much central.

There are good historical reasons, yes, but the balance shifted about 200 years ago. For a long time Charing Cross was treated as a semi-official designation of the centre point of London, for good reason.

> In terms of modern London though, I take it as defined by the M25, and on that scale, the everything from Greenwich to White City is pretty much central.

If you take expansive definitions like that, sure. But if e.g. people tell you they're "going in to London", odds are they're talking about Westminster unless they happen to work in banking.

There are endless definitions of this, but the point I was making is that when people think of London, City is rarely what they're thinking of. You see it even in the article, where they chose to lead with a picture from the centre of Westminster and describes it as "in the heart of London".

EDIT: This is particularly relevant in context of your original comment about the "essential purpose" of London: Westminster was nerver part of Roman London/Londinium - it was formed as a separate town. It's purpose was entirely different. What you describe as central London includes a number of other old towns with entirely different purposes to City.

Counterintuitively, the City of London isn't truly part of Greater London - it's maybe closer to the financial equivalent of the Vatican State in Rome.

In some ways it isn't even part of England or the UK. It has its own administrative, legal, and financial structures, it owns significant prime land around the rest of London, it has its own police force, and it even has its own political representative in Westminster (unelected, of course).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_remembrancer

People are often confused by this, because if they think about it at all they assume the City is a trading district where the banks live.

But it's a lot more than that. Its role in British and world history is huge. Its influence is also shadowy and relatively poorly documented, which is an interesting thing in itself.

Does that still work when applying the same logic to New York ? So the World Trade Center and Wall Street are not exactly central, and chances are, if you aren't going there unless you work in finance. When people talk about New York that's mostly Time Square and what's within at most 1 mile circle around. That seems strange to me.

I am not quite sure what point you are trying to prove, the City is mapped in full even on the most restrictive tourist map. It contains the Tower Bridge, the Tower of London. It is in Zone 1 of the tube. Except for some geographical and political quirks, I can't believe anybody, especially not Londoners, are going to be mislead by the article assumption.

I'm not trying to prove anything. The point was very simple: That City is different from what most people will think of when thinking of the centre of London. Even if you consider it part of the centre, it is at most a small part of it. I made it simply because people who don't live here often get confused by that distinction and think that City refers to London as a whole. The comment I replied to, appeared to try to extrapolate from the history of City to central London as a whole, for example, but City and the rest have very different histories and have been different cities for most of their history.

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