A History of London

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The performances at the public theatres were complemented by elaborate masques at the royal court and at the inns of court. Trade in London was organised into various guilds, which effectively controlled the city, and elected the Lord Mayor of the City of London.

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William III, a Dutchman, cared little for London, the smoke of which gave him asthma, and after the first fire at Whitehall Palace (1691) he purchased Nottingham House and transformed it into Kensington Palace. Goods were brought to London by England's increasingly dominant merchant navy, not only to satisfy domestic demand, but also for re-export throughout Europe and beyond. More people also moved to London for work and for business making London an altogether bigger and busier city. Towards the end of the war, during 1944/45 London again came under heavy attack by pilotless V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, which were fired from Nazi occupied Europe.We challenge you to pick an area you think you know like the back of your hand, and then be amazed when you follow this book's route through it. Foreigners are estimated to have made up 4,000 of the 100,000 residents of London by 1600, many being Dutch and German workers and traders. In addition to the detailed charting of the city’s inner workings, there are extravagant speculations about what London might have been, if only common sense and financial probity hadn’t got in the way of wild imagination. While this spurred the massive outward growth of the city, the growth of greater London also exacerbated the class divide, as the wealthier classes emigrated to the suburbs, leaving the poor to inhabit the inner city areas.

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If you are planning to visit London and want to get your children excited about the trip (and get them involved in planning the best things to do! Not only is the design beautiful, the book is filled with fun snippets guaranteed to hold all kids’ attention – such as the story of the polar bear that used to fish near the Tower of London! But before they could use fire hooks, the people of Pudding Lane needed to ask the Lord Mayor if they were allowed to – and he had to say ‘yes’. Kensington was then an insignificant village, but the arrival of the court soon caused it to grow in importance.Under James I the theatre, which established itself so firmly in the latter years of Elizabeth, grew further in popularity.