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London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.
The abbey, the palace and the government: a thousand years of English power in half a square mile.
The name means the minster west of the City, and the abbey is why everything else is here. Edward the Confessor rebuilt it and was buried in it days after it was consecrated in 1065; William the Conqueror was crowned in it the next year, and every coronation since has happened on the same spot. Henry III rebuilt it again in the Gothic it wears now. Kings living beside the abbey brought the government with them. By about 1200 the Palace of Westminster was the main royal residence and the treasury had moved down from Winchester; Parliament met in the palace, and when it burned down in 1834 in front of a crowd that included Turner, who painted it, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin replaced it with the building the world now uses as shorthand for Britain. Whitehall runs north from Parliament Square, lined with the ministries, the Cenotaph in the middle of the road and the gates of Downing Street halfway up. St James's Park lies alongside it, with pelicans that have been there since 1664. Two other churches are worth the detour: St Margaret's, the parish church in the abbey's shadow, and Westminster Cathedral on Victoria Street, a Byzantine pile of red and white brick finished in 1903, whose campanile has a lift and one of the best views in London for a couple of pounds.