London, already known Celtic center perhaps with the name of Lun Dun, it was valorized by the Romans after the conquest of Britain to work of Caesar in 43 AD, and it became the military and commercial center of the Roman occupation with the Latin name of Londinium. Submitted more times to the pressure of the Celtic populations of the North, the city was strengthened with the famous London Wall, a wall that delimited approximately an area correspondent to that of the City, but however it was occupied by the Barbarians in 296 AD and laboriously freed by the commander Costanzo Cloro.

In the 479 AD, the pressure of the Barbarians however defeated the Roman legions, and London, as the rest of the Country, it suffered continuous invasions of the Germanic and northern populations as the Sassonis in 604, the Vichinghis in the 800 and from Danish, that established a model of life founded more on the agriculture and on the feudalism, different from that civil and urban with roads and aqueducts known with the Romans. It was Alfred the Great one, king of Wessex, that regained it from Danish in the 878. This "turn over" however it determined a progressive decline of the city with a poor period of historical testimonies that lasted up to the VII century when, with the Sassonis, London became a center of intense commercial activities and of culture. Always in this period with the advent of the Christianity, it installs in London the first bishop, Mellito, and many convents are founded thereabouts of the city after, in 1042, Edward the Confessor, Anglo-Saxon of Norman mother,  establishing himself to Westminster, where it made then to erect the famous abbey.

The dealers organized in Guilds, which are granted by the sovereigns important autonomies, in any case the economic weight of such guilds reveals conclusive in the Norman conquest of England. Her London Guilds in fact they supported the Norman William I the Conqueror (duke of Normandia), which after the victory on Harold II of Wessex in the battle of Hastings, in 1066, it installs on the throne making of London the capital of its kingdom. Crowned to Westminster, the duke made to build on the rests of the Roman fortifications the White Tower, mighty tower subsequently widened by William II, who built the Westminster Hall.

Although London was struck by recurrent calamities, as the fire in 1077, it developing itself around the two poles that were the City of London, commercial center and the City of Wesminster, center of the court, often in contrast among them for the tendencies autonomistiche of the commercial middle class and those centralizing of the feudal aristocracy. In 1193 the city had his first Mayor and the importance of the city kept on growing. The great national monarchies (Tudor, Stuart) brought further prestige to the city and it did the center of all the greatest political and economic events of it. In these years London recorded a notable territorial expansion with an enormous increase of the population and of great buildings.

Henry VIII, the king of England child of Henry VII and Elizabeth, founded the Anglican National Church and he was the boss. Henry VII climbed to the throne in 1509, after the death of his brother Arthur. He married with the wife of this one, Caterina of Aragon,  Ferdinando's of Spain daughter. In the 1534 Henry VII asked to divorce from Caterina of Aragon to marry Ann Bolena. To Pope Clemente VII's refusal, he assumed the title of protector and supreme head of the English Church, archbishop of Canterbury Th. Cranmer and he made to annul from these his marriage. The Pope excommunication Henry VIII, but Henry reacted sending Thomas Moro and the bishop Fisher of Rochester, which were refused to recognize to the king the ecclesiastical supremacy, to death. In 1536, only two years later, Henry VIII already tired of Ann Bolena that a male heir had not given him, he accused her of adultery and he did her behead, while two days later he married Johnanna Seymour who died in 1537, after that Edward was born. In the following years he respectively married other three times, Ann Clèves, Caterina Howard and Caterina Parr.

Since that moment there were al lot of contrasts for the conquest of the throne as that between Elizabeth I and her cousin Mary Stuarda behead because she was a potential pretender to the throne. The 1642 civil war among the ruling Catholic Stuart and the puritanical ones driven by Oliver Cromwell, it concluded with the victory of this ones. But the republic, the only one ever existed on the island, lasted only eleven years: in 1660 in fact Charles II, reentered of the French exile, restored the monarchy.

Despite the whole, London didn't suffer substantial wisecracks of arrest, also after the 1655 terrible plague in which hundreds of thousand of Londoners lost the life and the calamity of the following year of the Great Fire: an initiated fire in Pudding Lane and lasted four days that it reduced in ash 13200 houses and 84 churches. But London became in little time one of the political centers, cultural (we remember the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare) and financial decisive in the history of the west.

The Industrial Revolution and the Victoria's age, modified the structure of the city and they determined an exceptional economic, political and demografic development. In the 1800 London almost counted 900.000 inhabitants. In 1837, with the slope to the throne of Queen Victoria, it had beginning the Gold Epoch of the city, with the construction of factories, suburbs I operated, railroads and with the Great Exposition (Great Universal Exposure) that it was the expression of the British power and the conquests of the industrial society. In March 1863 it was open the first line of the Tube, the London subway. To the death of the Queen Victoria in 1901, London counted 4 million inhabitants.
An abrupt demografic arrest was had with the world conflicts when the German bombardiers shaved to the ground the whole City. But in the following year London was quickly reconstructed so much by to entertain in 1948 the Olympic games, Today the old Londinium is the capital of a Country modernly industrialized with an undisputed leadership in the international finance.