The City of London

The City of London is only a very small part of Greater London, taking up little more than a square mile in area (approximately two square kilometers). Most of the bestknown parts of London, such as Parliament House, Westminster Abbey, Trafalgar Square, Oxford Street, the West End, and so on, are quite separate from the City of London. The City of London is usually referred to as just The City, and today it is devoted primarily to business and finance. The City plays a major role in global investment and finance and leads the rest of the world in certain areas. Enormous amounts of money are handled each day in currency conversions, and about forty percent of this dealing is carried out within the City. Approximately a quarter of a million people work in the City, many directly involved in finance, while others are working in the fields of law, accounting, banking, retailing, security, and transport. There are also people living within the City bounds, mainly in the Barbican development, but this number, around six thousand, is small compared to the number who need to commute there each day ("Introduction to the City of London").

References to "The City" and "The Crown" in Britain may be misunderstood by Americans. As noted, "The City" refers to a privately owned Corporation, or Sovereign State, occupying an irregular rectangle of 677 acres and located right in the heart of the 610 square mile "Greater London" area. The "Crown" is a committee of

Related Essays

The London Subway .... Farringdon Street. It provided a rail link from the Great Western Railway's terminus at Paddington to the City of London. By the .... (1067 4 )

William Blake's poem "London" .... The vision Blake offers of the city of London is of a setting where the spiritual has been sacrificed by societal institutions that degrade those charged with .... (519 2 )

Old London Bridge .... in 1290. By the time of the building of London Bridge, the city was in fact both the capital and center of the country. A great .... (2087 8 )

Poetry & Attitudes Toward Nature .... and the city, he can be compared to William Shakespeare, (1564-1616) England's greatest dramatist, who divided his time between the busy city of London and his .... (880 4 )

City of Los Angeles .... in. There is a "true" London, a London that, despite the nature of the city itself, exists as an ongoing historical entity. It may .... (721 3 )

28 it covered the whole of its present three acre site ("The Bank of EnglandA Brief History"). In 1797, because of the war with Revolutionary France and the resulting drain on the gold reserves, the Bank was prohibited from paying its notes in gold. This is known as the "Restriction Period" and lasted until 1821. In 1826, the Country Bankers' Act restricted the Bank's monopoly of jointstock banking to within 65 miles of London and allowed jointstock banks to set up outside that limit and issue their own notes. The Act also allowed the Bank to open branches anywhere in England. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 tied the note issue to the Bank's gold reserves, and now the Bank was required to keep the accounts of the note issue separate from those of its banking operations and to produce a weekly summary of both sets of accounts. The Bank Return is still published every Thursday. However, the Act was suspended during several financial crises in the nineteenth century when the Bank began more and more to avoid commercial banking and instead sought to control the level of interest rates and acted as the lender of last resort to cope with these crises: By the time of the Baring crisis in 1890, when a threat to the entire banki

Category: Foreign - T