London’s history

Everything you know about 17th-century London is wrong

History on film: London is smothered by a dangerous smog

The Great Fire of London: two historians discuss the events and legacy of the 1666 blaze. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

"Welcome home, Charlie": Chaplin’s postwar return to London

A prodigy in England: Lucy Worsley on Mozart’s London odyssey. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Shakespeare’s London: playing a dangerous game

10 dangers of Georgian London

9 things you (probably) didn’t know about London’s first zeppelin raid in 1915

Love, health and the weather: 9 things medieval Londoners worried about

Picture of the Frost Fair on the Thames

Q&ADid the Thames used to freeze over?

Amazing inventions and London after dark. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

BBC History Magazine

Old news: A tiger braves the mean streets of east London

Photo of Chelsea Pensioners

Q&ACould you really once be hanged for impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner?

A depiction of a public hanging of a bandit. (Photo by: Leemage/UIG via Getty Images)

Sin City: thievery, prostitution and murder in medieval London

BBC History Magazine

New website charts London's well-being across 125 years

Pompeii comes to London. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

BBC History Magazine

Live genealogy show returns to London Olympia

The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, London

Members of the royal family on board the royal barge 'Spirit of Chartwell'. (Rota/Anwar Hussein/Getty Images)

The LibraryThe Thames triumphant: royal parties on London's grandest street

The Cenotaph, London

In 1830 a keeper at the Tower of London menagerie accidentally removed the barrier between a lion and two tigers. The animals were eventually prised apart, by which point the lion had been fatally wounded. (Photo by Guildhall Library & Art Gallery/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Life with the lions: the Tower of London menagerie

Westminster Abbey, London

A woman puts a foundling, or her own unwanted child, into a revolving doorway in a hospital or orphanage wall, intended for unwanted children. (Getty Images)

A mother's love: tokens left with London's foundling babies

BBC History Magazine

Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society

Life in a London slum and the Last Judgement. This is a premium piece of content available to subscribed users.

Map of Bayham Park from ‘Repton’s Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture’ by JC Loudon. (Photo by The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)

John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843)