London Boroughs - History

History

The present London boroughs were created by the London Government Act 1963. They came into existence on 1 April 1965 with the creation of Greater London. The first London Borough elections had been held in 1964 with the newly elected London Borough Councils acting as "shadow" authorities before coming into power the following year.

They had wider authority than the inner London metropolitan boroughs and neighbouring urban districts and municipal boroughs which they mostly replaced, but less power than the three county boroughs of Croydon, West Ham and East Ham, which ceased to exist at the same time.

Between 1965 and 1986 the London boroughs were part of a two-tier system of government, and shared power with the Greater London Council (GLC). However on 1 April 1986, the GLC was abolished, the London boroughs inherited most of its powers and became in effect unitary authorities (combining both county and borough functions). Since the creation in 2000 of a new Greater London Authority, covering the former GLC area but with more limited powers, the boroughs no longer have all the powers of English unitary authorities.

The City of London is administered by its own distinct body, the City of London Corporation, which predates the London boroughs.

Read more about this topic:  London Boroughs

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
    But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
    Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)

    The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)