Stretching for more than thirty miles at its broadest point, London is by far the largest city in Europe. The majority of its sights are situated to the north of the River Thames, which loops through the city from west to east. However, there is no single predominant focus of interest, for London has grown not through centralized planning but by a process of agglomeration - villages and urban developments that once surrounded the core are now lost within the amorphous mass of Greater London.
One of the few areas that you can easily explore on foot is Westminster and Whitehall , the city's royal, political and ecclesiastical power base, where you'll find the National Gallery and a host of other London landmarks, from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. The grand streets and squares of St James's , Mayfair and Marylebone , to the north of Westminster, have been the playground of the rich since the Restoration, and now contain the city's busiest shopping zones.
East of Piccadilly Circus, Soho and Covent Garden are also easy to walk around and form the heart of the West End entertainment district, containing the largest concentration of theatres, cinemas, clubs, flashy shops, cafés and restaurants. To the north lies the university quarter of Bloomsbury , home to the ever-popular British Museum, and the secluded quadrangles of Holborn's Inns of Court, London's legal heartland.
The City - the City of London, to give it its full title - is at one and the same time the most ancient and the most modern part of London. Settled since Roman times, it is now one of the world's great financial centres, yet retains its share of historic sights, notably the Tower of London and a fine cache of Wren churches that includes St Paul's Cathedral. Despite creeping trendification, the East End , to the east of the City, is not conventional tourist territory, but to ignore it entirely is to miss out a crucial element of contemporary London. Docklands is the converse of the down-at-heel East End, with the Canary Wharf tower, the country's tallest building, epitomizing the pretensions of the Thatcherite dream.
