O.O'Brien

When I was at school, I lived a long way up north. My geography of the much of the rest of the U.K. was limited to the AA road atlas my parents had in the car, which I used to look at compulsively during long journeys. I was fascinated by the schematic diagrams showing the layout of road junctions on each of the motorways. The motorways were represented on the diagrams themselves by dead straight lines – with one exception: the M25. This motorway was shown as a square, apparently enclosing all of London. So, for many years, I assumed that the London boundary was the M25 itself. I was a little disappointed when I moved down to the city and discovered this was not the case. Several large areas – Epsom, Loughton, Watford – are comfortably inside the M25 ring but not within the administrative boundary of Greater London. Similarly, the boundary pushes out beyond the M25 in a few, generally rural, places.

It turns out there are a lot of official and unofficial ways to define London’s extent.

• Greater London – the administrative extent, made up of the 32 London boroughs and the City of London at its centre. It is the area that is administered by the boroughs and also forms the area of the six concentric Transport for London travelcard zones – although there are some “special” additional zones which go beyond the boundary. Greater London is shown above.
• Greater London Urban Area (aka Greater London Built-up Area) – the Office of National Statistics defines this as the conurbation area of London (i.e. the continuous urban environment) which is roughly equivalent to Greater London but excludes the large rural areas within the latter boundary, such as Biggin Hill, and includes some towns which “spill over” the Greater London boundary, such as Staines and Dartford.
• London Travel to Work Area (TTWA) – Travel to Work Areas are contiguous regions within which 75% of people who live there also work there, and vice versa. London is such a region, its TTWA extends slightly beyond Greater London to include places with sufficiently good transport links that, as far as employment is concerned, are “local”, and that don’t themselves have a considerable industrial or commercial base. The map here is the London TTWA from the 2001 census, the areas were defined in 2007 and the map is an extract of one produced by the ONS in 2013:
• The extent of the “020” telephone number prefix – the dialling code for “London”.
• The London postal district – the extent of the SW, W, NW, N, E and SE postcodes. These miss out a surprisingly large part of the London urban area, except in the north, where they even extend beyond the Greater London boundary.
• The County of London – this approximately represented inner London and ceased to exist in 1965 with the creation of Greater London. However many older people continue to refer to the counties that were lost or redrawn to accommodate Greater London, such as Middlesex, which is now subsumed by the northern part of Greater London.
• The City of London – this still exists but only covers the Square Mile – the financial and historic centre of London. It is surrounded by the 32 London boroughs. One of the other boroughs – Westminster – is also a city. Hence the electoral constituency which currently covers both being called “Cities of London and Westminster”.
• Mayor’s Wider London Boundary – “This is the area within which the Mayor has the right to make increments or decrements to National Rail franchises” according to this document. It appears to be made up of the Greater London administrative boundary plus nearby commuter towns that have direct routes to central London, e.g. Sevenoaks, Dartford, Hertford, Broxbourne. I haven’t been able to find a complete map of it though.

Personally, I still prefer the M25 as the boundary. If I’m heading on a long cycle ride from the centre of London to (say) Brighton, then its when I pass underneath the M25 – a very tangible, physical feature – that I feel I have finally left the city. None of the other borders described above are represented on the ground, other than by road signs. But you can’t miss a huge 6+ lane orbital highway.

The bottom set of pictures are, clockwise from the top right: The London postal district in red, the London Travel To Work Area in dark blue, the former County of London in green, the City of London in bright red, aerial imagery of London’s built up areas, and the London 020 dialling code area in red. Apart from the top picture, which is from OpenStreetMap, all pictures are sourced from Wikipedia. All the picture here are are subject to Creative Commons copyrights of their respective authors. The middle picture shows Greater London, with the boroughs (and the City of London) numbered.

Updated June 2013 to add the Mayor’s Wider London boundary, and in December 2013 to add the ONS TTWA 2001 map.

Cross-posted from the Hodder Geography Nest blog, where I am one of this month’s guest-bloggers.

I was walking down Bishopsgate in the City of London yesterday, and I noticed the giant concrete “core” of the Pinnacle, the City’s next skyscraper, has finally started to rise out of the ground. It’s just one of a number of very tall buildings now under construction in London, after a couple of quiet years due to the economic conditions. The Pinnacle, also known as the Bishopsgate Tower and nicknamed the Helter-Skelter because of its spiral shape, will be 288m tall and is due to be completed by the end of 2012.

Next door, the Leadenhall Building is due to commence construction in early 2011, it will be 225m high and also has a nickname, the Cheese Grater. Just up the road is the Heron Tower, 230m high and was completed in July, it opens early next year. Not far away is 20 Fenchurch Street, nicknamed the Walkie Talkie because of its bulging design, which is due to start construction any day now and will be 160m high. Finally, just across London Bridge, is the Shard, which will be the tallest of all – the main core has already risen 60 stories high, and the building will be 310m high when complete, again in 2012, making it the tallest building in the European Union. A photograph of the Shard under construction is on the right.

Many of these new skyscrapers will have public viewing galleries and rooftop restaurants, so for those without a fear of heights, it is going to be an exciting few years.

An artist’s impression of the Pinnable is on the left. Three of the four buildings on the right of the picture have now been demolished – 30 St Mary Axe, popularly known as the Gherkin, remains, but the two square buildings will soon instead be replaced with the Cheese Grater and the Walkie Talkie. The building at the front has also been demolished and replaced with a new mid-level office building.

It’s anything but straightforward to build a skyscraper in London though. The planning process takes many years, and many organisations voice objections at the public enquiries, notably English Heritage, which manages the historic built environment of the country. The costs of building a skyscraper are of course very high, and there is always the risk that the demand for office space has dropped by the time the building is finally completed, as happened with the Broadgate Tower last year.

There is one other factor that is special to London – St Paul’s Cathedral, or specifically, viewing corridors to it. There are ten designated places in London, from which the view to the cathedral must be uninterrupted. Some of the places include Primrose Hill, Greenwich Park, Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, Alexandra Palace and most interestingly King Henry VIII’s Mound in Richmond Park. The latter view is through a small hole cut in the hedge on the mound, allowing a suprising glimpse of the cathedral standing nearly 10 miles away.

One very different kind of building development that opened last fortnight was One New Change, a shopping mall and offices on Cheapside, directly east from the cathedral. It is just 40m high, despite having as much floor space as the 225m Leadenhall Building. The building height was very deliberately fixed, so that the building appears to “nestle” alongside St Paul’s rather than overshadowing it.

The new City skyscrapers are all clustered together in the eastern part of the Square Mile, where they don’t impact on the St Paul’s protected views – by not blocking the building, appearing to be close by it from the viewpoints, or adding a dominating backdrop. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Cheese Grater building slopes back is to minimise its impact on the skyline with respect to the cathedral. No super-tall skyscrapers will be appearing immediately beside the cathedral, or to its north or west, any time soon.

The map below shows some of the protected views to St Paul’s Cathedral – marked with the red pin. King Henry VIII’s Mound is marked with the green pin.

The image of the Shard under construction is CC-By-SA George Rex photography on Flickr. The artists impression of the Pinnacle is CC-By-SA Will Fox on Wikipedia. The OpenStreetMap screenshot is of data which is CC-By-SA OpenStreetMap contributors. The photo of St Paul’s Cathedral with the pre-2007 skyscrapers is by the author.