I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1818)
Let me start with a sincere apology to professor R., perhaps the only person who is at all interested in reading this blog. It would be fair to say that I still have much to work on with regards to punctuality. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the following post.
As you might have heard, the United Kingdom was affected by an unprecedented heatwave a few weeks ago. Temperatures as high as 37° Celsius were reported, and in London, where I was staying, a conference focused on dealing with extreme heat was cancelled due to the extreme heat. This would've been hilarious, if not for the fact that nearly three thousand Brits had died as a result. In spite of the infernal weather conditions, I had what was, by all accounts, a rather enjoyable time.
The City of London (not to be confused with Greater London, the city of 9 million residents within which it is nestled) is a baffling accident of history with which most people (and even many Londoners) are unfamiliar. Nicknamed "the Square Mile" for its size, it lies smack dab in the middle of Central London and makes up most of London's financial district. However, it is not considered a borough; rather, it is an independent city – the smallest in Britain – and has its own unique electoral system: being home to only 15 thousand residents and hundreds of corporate headquarters, it allows commercial firms to vote in the elections to the City of London Corporation, with voting power determined by the size of their workforce. As a result, business voters drastically outnumber the City's actual residents.
But how exactly did this arrangement come about? The City of London made up the entirety of "London proper" from its founding as a Roman fort around 47 CE until the establishment of the County of London under the Local Government Act of 1888; having failed to take it by force, William the Conqueror offered Londoners a compromise in 1067, granting them an extraordinary degree of autonomy in exchange for their loyalty. Due to the strength of its walls and the access to the seas via the Thames, London became the epicenter of trade and craft in medieval England.
Since the opening of the Royal Exchange in 1571, which served as London's first stock exchange, the City started attracting financial institutions from across Europe; by the end of the 20th century, it had headquartered the Bank of England, Lloyd's, and the present-day London Stock Exchange. From 1851 to 1991, the City's population declined from nearly 133 thousand to less than 4 thousand. After the Blitz, the remains of many residential buildings became the grounds on which many of London's iconic highrises were built.