Greater London - History

History

London is divided into the small City of London and the much wider Greater London. This arrangement has come about because as the area of London grew and absorbed neighbouring settlements, a series of administrative reforms did not amalgamate the City of London with the metropolitan area, and its unique political structure was retained. Outside the limited boundaries of the old city, a variety of arrangements have governed the wider area since 1855, culminating with the creation of the Greater London administrative area in 1965.

London became a greater and still greater accumulation of towns, an immense colony of dwellings where people still live in their own home in small communities with local government just as they had done in the Middle Ages. —Steen Eiler Rasmussen, 1934

The term Greater London was used well before 1965, particularly to refer to the area covered by the Metropolitan Police District (such as in the 1901 census), the area of the Metropolitan Water Board (favoured by the London County Council for statistics), the London Passenger Transport Area and the area defined by the Registrar General as the Greater London Conurbation. The Greater London Arterial Road Programme was devised between 1913 and 1916. One of the larger early forms was the Greater London Planning Region, devised in 1927, which occupied 1,856 square miles (4,810 km2) and included 9 million people.