London’s distinctive black taxicab is a familiar feature of the city scene. The cabs and their drivers, the London cabbies, are products of a system of licensing that dates to 1639. By about 1900 more than 11,000 registered cabs were plying for hire on the streets of London, and there were double that number a century later. Motorized cabs first made their appearance in 1904 and soon displaced the horse-drawn unit (the last survived until 1947). A regulation passed in 1906 required the new mechanical cabs to be designed in such a way that they could turn in the same tight circle as a two-wheeled hansom cab. Still in force, it accounts for the surprising maneuverability of black cabs in congested London streets and their distinctive “sit up and beg” design. Cabbies themselves are subjected to even older regulations, which require them to pass a detailed test on topography, street names, and principal destinations throughout a 6-mile (10-km) radius from Charing Cross. Trainee taxi drivers acquiring “the knowledge,” as it is called, are a familiar sight on the streets of the capital.

The City Corporation

The Lord Mayor and City Corporation of London form one of the oldest local governments in the world, with a history of municipal autonomy extending in unbroken succession to the folkmoots of the early Middle Ages. The Square Mile remains an autonomous jurisdiction within its historic boundaries, with its own police force and a complete range of municipal services attending to the needs of its relatively small resident population and a vastly larger weekday working population. Through the centuries the City Corporation has accumulated immense resources of capital and property, entrenching itself alongside its historic foes, the crown and the aristocracy, at the pinnacle of Britain’s stratified society. The City has never concerned itself with the wider issues of local government in the metropolis, except insofar as they impinge on its own position and privileges, which are tenaciously defended.

Around the unyielding nucleus of the Square Mile, arrangements for the wider metropolis have developed by stages. The City’s indifference left a mid-19th-century population of almost three million under an anarchic miscellany of more or less undemocratic bodies based either on medieval ecclesiastical parishes or on ad hoc service agencies created under local legislation. In 1855 water and sewerage provision for the entire built-up area were brought under the control of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Following charges of corruption and lack of accountability, the organization was transformed in 1889 into the administrative nucleus of an elected local government for London as a whole, the London County Council (LCC). However, the City Corporation successfully lobbied to preserve its autonomy and secured the creation of a second tier of elected local governments, the metropolitan boroughs, to function as a political counterweight to the LCC.

Greater London

The same two-tier pattern, with its attendant tensions, was repeated in 1965 when the LCC was replaced by the Greater London Council. Its boundaries were extended to include suburbs developed after 1888—i.e., more or less the entire built-up area within the Green Belt. At the same time, more than 100 existing local councils were amalgamated to form a modernized system of 33 boroughs, including the City of London and its considerably younger neighbor, the City of Westminster, chartered in 1900. The strategic authority and the local councils were at loggerheads from the outset, and their rivalries were intensified by shifts of political control at national, Greater London, and borough levels. Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put these wranglings to an end in 1986 by the drastic expedient of abolishing the Greater London Council (then dominated by the opposition Labour Party) and stripping away its municipal assets. The majestic County Hall, across the bridge from the Palace of Westminster, was sold to developers for conversion into an entertainment center and a residential complex. London was left, uniquely among the world’s great cities, with no form of civic leadership. Municipal affairs were distributed among the 33 borough councils, supplemented by a variety of ad hoc groupings and centrally appointed bodies for single services.

The balkanization of London government did not prove permanent. That it could be attempted at all was testimony to the widespread influence of the City Corporation’s view of London as a collection of localities rather than a single entity. In a 1998 referendum Londoners accepted a plan to reestablish a citywide administration, which would operate in conjunction with existing Greater London boroughs. Established in 2000, the new Greater London Authority comprised a directly elected mayor and a 25-member assembly, and it assumed some of the local responsibilities that the central government had handled since 1986—notably over transport, planning, police, and emergency services.

The London boroughs set up in 1965 were large units, with populations usually of 100,000 to 200,000, designed to achieve efficiencies of service provision rather than reflect local loyalty and sense of identity. When Londoners are asked where they live, they are more likely to give the name of their nearest railway station or shopping center or of the pre-1965 administrative unit than of the modern borough.