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Taxi and Big Ben vector by Twin Design. Cathedral vector by Oleg7799. Bus vector by Bioraven. House on fire vector by Rashad Ashurov. Bridge vector by Siloto.

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Julian Beecroft has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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London must have a fair claim to being the greatest city on Earth. In summer 2016, it displaced New York City as the place where the global rich and famous most wanted to live – or at least to place their money – and where large numbers of the world’s brightest and most ambitious people longed to settle and make their names.

According to one index, it is one of two alpha ++ global cities – a ranking it earns from the pivotal role it plays in so many aspects of the world economy, from cultural exchange to business activity, from its ability to attract the best brains to the capacity of its businesses and institutions to innovate across so many fields.

But these statistics don’t get near to explaining why London is also the most visited city in the Western world and, at the time of writing, the second most visited on the planet after Bangkok. Being so hard to pin down is perhaps the very quality that draws people to London in the first place, as the city seems so much greater than our ability to comprehend it, not only in size but in scope.

There are certain natural advantages which, even in prehistoric times, made the current site of London the most obvious place for a principal settlement on the island of Britain (as we now know it), and later the most natural place in the country for a capital: its location on the banks of a broad and navigable river that flowed swiftly to the sea and back as, twice a day, the tide went out and came in again. In 2010, a survey of the foreshore at Vauxhall found evidence of a bridge some 6,000 years old, in the form of six timber piles sticking out of the mud, close to the site of a later wooden structure, a mere 3,500 years old, that now partly resides in the Museum of London. It was and has remained ever since a perfect place for trade, even if in that regard the river has lost its pre-eminent role in the past half-century. Britain remains what it has always been – a great trading nation – and it has always taken its lead from London.

By the time of the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, areas close to the river had been inhabited for thousands of years. The Romans, always quick to see a strategic advantage, founded the capital of the new province of Britannia on the same site and gave it the name Londinium. The city grew quickly to a place of 20,000 souls and became the hub of a series of characteristically straight Roman roads reaching out to all parts of the province.

Those parts of the old London Wall that can still be seen, such as the original section next to the Museum of London, date back to the Romans, as does the amphitheatre discovered and now – partly and rather brilliantly – displayed in the basement of the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London. This is not unusual: as the modern City continues to expand, mostly upwards, new foundations are sunk into parts of the subsoil that have lain undisturbed for millennia so new discoveries are continually being made. However, despite many Britons acknowledging what the Romans had done for them, bringing the cultural and human variety of the first global empire to this cold northern outpost, not everyone was happy.

DISASTERS: THE ORIGINAL GREAT FIRE OF LONDON

Queen Boudicca, a heroine of British history, was no lover of the global power of Rome and the international community of immigrant workers and elite non-doms that populated Roman London. She had good reason to despise an occupying power which had annexed her kingdom and whose soldiers had raped her own daughters, so in AD 61 she led a raid on Londinium. She torched and sacked this cosmopolitan city, killing 30,000 Londoners and burning it to the ground. She and her people, the Iceni, paid dearly for the uprising, but she earned a place in folklore as the original champion of British liberty against the oppressive might of European imperial power – whether real or imagined! But just as this instinct is ingrained in the national character, so an indelible trait since that first cosmopolis is the irrepressible energy of London, its bouncebackability, the self-interested wisdom of its openness to the world. So it was that just a few years after what we might call the first Great Fire, Londinium had re-established itself as the dominant city in Roman Britain, famous according to the Roman writer Tacitus for ‘its concourse of merchants and for the abundance of its provisions’.

The Romans built the first London Bridge on the site of the current bridge, as we know from the remains of a wooden pier, dating back to c. AD 85, discovered at Pudding Lane in the heart of the City. After a further great fire in AD 122, which wiped out most of the early Roman city, a newly rebuilt Londinium thrived, reaching a peak population of some 60,000 people – a number that would not be exceeded until the Middle Ages. But after the Romans left in AD 410, the city declined to such an extent that by the end of the fifth century fewer than 1,000 people were left in the area. For the next few hundred years, the old city was abandoned and a settlement named Lundenwic (meaning ‘London marketplace’) grew up on the site of today’s Covent Garden – controlled by first the East Saxons and then the Mercians – whose population by AD 750 had grown to some 8,000 people.

Attacks by Vikings in the mid-ninth century led to the new town’s occupation by the Danes, but the place simply had too much going for it for the Saxons, once an immigrant people themselves, to accept this theft of their greatest urban asset. In 880 or thereabouts, after just a few decades in the hands of the invaders, King Alfred recaptured the site with his Saxon army and gave it yet another change of name: to Lundenburh or Lundenburg. Over the following century or so it would gradually become the nation’s permanent seat of government, as well as its principal city of trade.

ALONG THE RIVER: TEDDINGTON LOCK TO RICHMOND

One of the best ways to properly appreciate the history and character of London is by travelling the length of the river that runs through it from Teddington to the Thames Estuary. Once an artery of energetic trade and now mostly a peaceful conduit of leisure, the tidal Thames begins 68 miles from the sea at Teddington Lock, on the outer edge of southwest London. The first fixed crossing over the tidal river beyond the lock, Richmond Bridge dates from the late eighteenth century and is the oldest surviving of London’s many bridges. By the time we reach it we have already passed through Strawberry Hill. This is the site of Strawberry Hill House: Horace Walpole’s eighteenth-century Gothic revival fantasy, whose style would do so much to shape the aesthetic of Victorian London.

As we come through Twickenham, we pass by Eel Pie Island, which in the 1960s was the site of the Eel Pie Island Hotel, one of the more vibrant music venues in the capital, with The Who and The Rolling Stones among the acts to have played there. Further downriver, on the way to the bridge, two fine houses can be seen on opposite banks: first Ham House on the Richmond (or Surrey) side, a Jacobean mansion regarded as one of the finest surviving houses of the period. Then we find Marble Hill House, an elegant villa built a century later in the Palladian style, on the Twickenham (or Middlesex) side. A ferry service, Hammerton’s Ferry, takes pedestrians and cyclists across the narrow stretch of river in this southwestern part of London. The other such ferry on the London Thames is the Woolwich Ferry which runs across the very wide river beyond the Thames Barrier at the city’s eastern limit.

Leaving Richmond Bridge behind us, we soon pass the site of Richmond Palace, the favourite residence of Queen Elizabeth I and one of the first buildings anywhere to be fitted with a flushing toilet, designed by Elizabeth’s godson, Sir John Harrington. Today only a few minor elements of the original complex of buildings remain standing; it was demolished and its building materials sold off in the 1650s during the short-lived English Commonwealth presided over by Oliver Cromwell.

A visitor walking around London in the centuries before and even after the Great Fire of 1666 might have been impressed above all by the number of churches in this city famous for trade and commerce. But, as we know from the remains of the Temple of Mithras at Walbrook discovered in 1954, religious buildings have always been an integral part of the fabric of London. And while the great age of church building might have passed, some of London’s most breathtaking modern structures are religious buildings dedicated to other faiths, whose communities form a strong part of the social fabric of modern London. So while it’s hard to imagine the capital without its many churches, it’s even harder to think of modern London without its many faiths.

At the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, stands St Paul’s Cathedral, perhaps the building that for centuries was seen as the symbol of the capital, both by Londoners and people around the world. In fact, the current cathedral is the fourth to have stood on this site, the first three having been destroyed by the great fires of 961, 1087 and, most famously, 1666. The present building only escaped the same fate, by what some would describe as a miracle, in the great fire of 29 December 1940, when the Luftwaffe bombed the historic areas of the City of London around St Paul’s, destroying many churches and historic buildings.

Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, St Paul’s is the outstanding masterpiece of English Baroque architecture. It is notable for its harmonious marriage of the general plan common to most English medieval cathedrals – with a transept and a long nave – and the elegant European sophistication of the buildings by which Wren was inspired: in particular, François Mansart’s Church of the Val-de-Grâce in Paris and Michelangelo’s Basilica of St Peter’s in Rome.

Wren had already taken on the rebuilding, to his own new designs, of more than 50 of the City’s parish churches after the Great Fire when this most prestigious of commissions was also entrusted to him. Such an important building brought with it all kinds of expectations from members of the clergy as to what an Anglican cathedral should look like. Several of Wren’s earlier designs were rejected, including the one for which the ‘Great Model’ was made in 1674 to demonstrate his ideas; visitors can still view this marvellous 1:25 scale alternative at the cathedral today. And even the finished building drew objections, as the ingenious central double-skinned dome, when first proposed, was considered by some a particularly ‘popish’ invention. The circular promenade that runs around the interior of the base of the dome is known as the Whispering Gallery, on account of peculiar acoustics which make it possible to hear someone speaking very quietly on the opposite side.

Many of Britain’s most famous men (though very few women) are buried or commemorated at St Paul’s, including Wren himself, as well as some of London’s most famous sons, such as the painter J. M. W. Turner, the poet and painter William Blake, and the poet John Donne, who for the latter part of his life was Dean of Old St Paul’s. In the crypt the nation’s two most renowned military men, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Nelson, lie in impressive sarcophagi reflecting their exalted status in British history.

The cathedral is also a working church, and in living memory it has played host to some of the nation’s most solemn public events, such as the funerals of Sir Winston Churchill and the former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, not to mention the wedding in 1981 of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

Aside from St Paul’s, of the 54 churches that Wren designed as part of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, 26 still stand which either survived the Blitz and earlier Victorian destruction or else were reconstructed after World War Two. The variety of these structures, conceived and built at an astonishing rate during the 1670s and 1680s, is testament to the fecundity of Wren’s genius. Among the most interesting are St Bride’s in Fleet Street, known as the Journalists’ Church, which with its distinctive tall spire resembles a many-tiered pagoda, making it the second-highest of Wren’s churches after St Paul’s. Then there are St Stephen’s, Walbrook, with its beautiful domed interior, and St Mary-le-Bow, whose great bell is remembered in ‘Oranges and Lemons’, the famous nursery rhyme about the City’s churches. Traditionally, anyone born within earshot of ‘Bow Bells’ is entitled to call themselves a Cockney, but given the level of noise and the absence of housing in the modern hub of global finance that is the City of London today, that must make Cockneys a tribe on the brink of going extinct.

Westminster Abbey is the finest Gothic building in London and, in constitutional terms, the most important religious building in England – a status reflected in its description as a ‘Royal Peculiar’, making the Dean of the Abbey answerable directly to the Queen and not to any bishop or even to the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. Constructed over a period of almost three centuries, the abbey has the highest nave of any English church, while the fan-vaulted ceiling of the Lady Chapel – begun in the reign of Henry VII – is one of the marvels of English architecture. But as with St Paul’s, its history dates back to Saxon times, when a Benedictine abbey was built on the site of what was then an island in the Thames, known as Thorney Island. Edward the Confessor, the most devout of English kings and a bona fide Catholic saint, had his palace adjacent to the abbey on the current site of the Houses of Parliament. In 1042, inspired by a dream, he instructed that the existing abbey be replaced with an abbey church, which was referred to as the ‘West Minster’, or west monastery, to distinguish it from the cathedral of St Paul’s, further downriver to the east.

Edward the Confessor died in January 1066, and Harold Godwinson is likely to have been crowned there a week or so later, as was his successor, William of Normandy – the man who defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings – before the same year was out. Indeed, one of its greatest treasures testifies to its special role in the national story. The Coronation Chair made for Edward I, conqueror of Wales, is a huge oaken throne designed to incorporate the famous Stone of Scone beneath its seat. This sacred rock – also known as the Stone of Destiny – has been venerated by Scots for a thousand years but was stolen by King Edward in 1296 specifically to take its appointed place beneath the seat of the Coronation Chair. Since then, every English or British monarch – aside from Edward V in the fifteenth century and Edward VIII in the twentieth century – including Elizabeth II, the present Queen, has been crowned in that chair. However, in 1996 the UK’s then-Prime Minister, John Major, instructed that the stone be returned to Scotland on the understanding it would be loaned back whenever it was needed in the future.

The current building, whose proper name is the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, was begun in the thirteenth century on the orders of Henry III. Over almost five centuries from the death of that same monarch, Henry III, in 1272 to that of George II in 1760, the abbey was the burial place of the majority of English kings and queens; the Protestant Elizabeth I and Mary I – her predecessor, rival and Catholic half-sister – are both buried in one of the numerous side chapels: and in the same tomb to boot, an indignity that no male monarch has had to endure! But the area most beloved by visitors is probably Poets’ Corner, which reads like the Contents page of an anthology of the greatest British writers, either buried or commemorated in this spot: from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Jane Austen and all three Brontë sisters, and most recently, the great nature poet Ted Hughes.

In fact, Westminster Abbey was only finally finished in 1745, with the addition of the two distinctive west towers. The architect who designed them, Nicholas Hawksmoor, had died almost a decade earlier, but his legacy can still be seen all over the capital: in the work he did as assistant to Wren on St Paul’s, the new apartments for King William III at Hampton Court Palace, the ensemble of buildings for the Greenwich Hospital and the six highly original churches for whose design he was wholly responsible, whose eclecticism and inventiveness were far ahead of their time. These are mostly in the City and the East End: Christ Church Spitalfields, which has a Gothic steeple but a portico that uses classical elements, St George in the East at Wapping, with its castellated spire and smaller corner towers which, according to one observer, resemble pepper pots, and St Mary Woolnoth, close to the Bank of England, whose eccentric flat façade makes for an imposing wall of stone but whose interior is flooded with light.

Though the churches of Wren and Hawksmoor have come to define the church architecture of the parishes of old London, they are not the full story, as not every medieval church was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Among the survivors, one of the oldest is Temple Church, which sits in a quiet courtyard between Fleet Street and the River Thames, in the heart of London’s legal district. It has found new fame in recent years as an element in the plot of Dan Brown’s worldwide bestseller The Da Vinci Code, but its own storied history is fascinating even without the fictitious boost.

Built by the mysterious Knights Templar – a monastic order of soldiers – upon their return from the second Crusade, the oldest part of the current building, the Round Church which now acts as a nave, was in use by 1162. Its shape was designed to mimic and recreate the sanctity of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the city which for Christians is the centre of the world and whose defence was the order’s central purpose.

During the period of the Crusades, the Templars enjoyed enormous influence and held all the lands around the church between Fleet Street and the river, the site of the numerous legal chambers of today’s Inner and Middle Temples. These monks-cum-fighting men acted as bankers and diplomatic brokers to successive kings, but were on the wrong side of history when in 1215 they supported King John in his failed attempt to resist the demands of the rebel barons, which led that summer to Magna Carta.

The church’s rectangular chancel was added in 1240, but at the start of the fourteenth century the order was abolished by Pope Clement V. Two centuries on, King James I restored the Templars to some position of influence in England, allowing them to regain their former lands in London on condition that the two Inns of Court which occupied the land undertake to maintain the church itself in perpetuity ‘for the celebration of divine service’.

In the heart of Covent Garden, at the centre of London’s theatre district, sits St Paul’s Church, known to Londoners as the Actors’ Church. Finished in 1633, and thus predating Wren’s achievements by several decades, it was designed by Inigo Jones – the man responsible for introducing the ideas of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio to Britain – though the exterior of the temple-like building of St Paul’s follows the ideas of the early Roman architect Vitruvius (first century BC).

In fact, Jones was responsible for designing the whole of London’s first public square, Covent Garden Piazza, which became a huge influence on the future layout of London, of which St Paul’s is the only surviving building along the western side. These days the classical portico facing onto the square, blocked up since it was built, often serves as a backdrop to the street performers who ply their trade in the bustling heart of Covent Garden, while the peaceful rose garden leading up to the entrance, at the back of the church, has long been a favourite place for people working in the area to take their lunch.

St Martin-in-the-Fields, in the northeastern corner of Trafalgar Square, has been the site of a church possibly since Roman times. Fields did indeed surround it right up until the Tudor period, before the area between the respective cities of London and Westminster was developed. The church is a Neoclassical design by James Gibbs, completed in 1726. In 2008, a new East Window was unveiled to replace one damaged in the bombing of World War Two; featuring a warped, ovum-shaped central lacuna by Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary, it transcends any religious affiliation and is one of the outstanding permanent works of modern art in London.

Beneath the church is the spacious crypt, which hosts a café long-favoured by Londoners as somewhere to get good, cheap, hearty food. And the presence of so many of central London’s homeless people in the nearby streets points to Connection at St Martin’s, the capital’s largest homeless charity, which offers a range of services including a day and a night shelter in a nearby building.

Like Temple Church and many other religious buildings in London, St Martin’s also hosts a thriving programme of classical music concerts. The Academy of St Martin in the Fields, one of the world’s leading chamber orchestras, gave its maiden performance in the church in 1959 under the direction of its founder, the conductor Sir Neville Marriner.

All Saints Margaret Street is one of London’s architectural wonders, a brick-built High Anglican church constructed on a tiny plot just 100 square feet on a side street just off the northern end of Regent Street. It was commissioned in the 1840s by the Ecclesiological Society, who wanted: a ‘model Church on a large and splendid scale’, whose architect should be ‘a single, pious and laborious artist alone, pondering deeply over his duty to do his best for the service of God’s Holy Religion’. That ‘artist’ was William Butterfield and All Saints is his masterpiece.

Designed in 1850 in the Gothic Revival style and completed in 1859, it is all the more astonishing in that the desired ‘model church on a splendid scale’ would have to contend with surrounding buildings in close proximity and thus a very confined site with a restricted amount of natural light. As a result, there are fewer windows than normal for a church of this size, and these are mostly high up. What makes All Saints truly remarkable is the decoration of seemingly every available surface – not just the stained-glass windows but the walls, floor and ceilings – with a bewildering array of decorative strategies: narrative biblical scenes on the walls of the nave using coloured ceramic tiles, paintings on gilded boards in the chancel and the intricate tiled patterns of the floors. The patterning begins on the outside of the church in the use of red and black bricks – previously a material chosen for less important buildings – in a decorative scheme that was built into the structure and would exert a big influence on later Victorian architecture.

Bevis Marks is London’s oldest and most beautiful synagogue. It is also the only synagogue in Europe to have been in continuous use for more than 300 years. Founded in 1701 by the Sephardi community of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, the building occupies a site in the heart of the City, just around the corner from 30 St Mary Axe, otherwise known as the Gherkin. Miraculously, it managed to get through the Blitz unscathed, but in 1992 it was badly damaged by an IRA bomb that targeted the Baltic Exchange, which used to stand on the site now occupied by the Gherkin. It has since been restored and is still used by British Jews for major ceremonies, also serving a modern congregation from all over the world who work in the City, thus earning it the sobriquet ‘The Synagogue in the Square Mile’.