ABSTRACT
Roman Londinium, in its high imperial summer the best part of two millennia ago, numbered at most 50,000 people and was a mile across. By William the Conqueror’s time its population had sunk to 15,000. In 1777, when Dr Johnson remarked that the man who was tired of London was tired of life, open country was two miles from the centre of town and there were probably 750,000 inhabitants. Twentieth-century Greater London, at its height, held over eight and a half million people and covered 610 square miles. Its built-up area in parts was up to thirty miles across.
