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This is London!

Every year, more than 9 million people come from countries all over the world to visit London. They go to the theatres and museums; they look at interesting old buildings, many of them hundreds of years old; they sit or walk in the beautiful parks, or have a drink in a pub.

They go to Oxford Street to look at the shops, or to Harrods. Two million visitors go to the Tower of London. A million more go to see St Paul's Cathedral. Yes, London is a big and beautiful city with lots to see and do. But how did it all begin . ..?

 

2 In the beginning

The name London comes from the Romans. There were people living here before they came, but we do not know very much about them.

The Romans came to England in AD 43. They built houses and other buildings and made a town next to the River Thames. They called the town Londinium. The town got bigger and bigger. Important new buildings went up, and you can see some of the Roman city wall today, near the Museum of London.

It was a rich town with about 50,000 people living in it. But soon after AD 400, the Romans left Londinium to go back to Rome, and nobody lived in the town for many hundreds of years. The buildings began to fall down.

Danish soldiers destroyed more buildings nearly five hundred years later. King Alfred was king of England then. He got the Danes to leave London and his men built the town again. In 1066, William the Conqueror came to England from France to be king. Soon after, he began to build the Tower of London.

When Henry the Eighth was king in 1509, 50,000 people lived in London again. By the year 1600, there were 200,000, but a lot of them lived in old and dirty buildings. In 1665, 100,000 people died from an illness called the plague. This was called the year of 'The Great Plague'.

A year later, in 1666, there was a big fire - The Fire of London. The fire destroyed most of the worst old buildings, and the new houses that went up after this were better for people to live in. By 1881, more than three million people lived in London. Today, more than six million people live here.

 



Date: 2015-02-16; view: 1225


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