Great Western Coffee Shop

Another thread got me thinking - thanks for the inspiration, Lordgoata.   How wide do you define "London"


At one extreme, there's the square mile -The City of London

The Metropolitain Railway used to to out to Brill and Verney Junction, and have services to Southend

I have had customers from outside the UK stay somewhere in a London postcode area and assume the Melksham is London too, as being within an easy communing distance out on a daily basis for an IT course.

If you are in aviation, then very wide:-

• London Ashford Airport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ashford_Airport), in Lydd, Kent
• London Oxford Airport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Oxford_Airport), in Kidlington, Oxfordshire
• London Southend Airport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Southend_Airport), in Rochford, Essex

:-\

It depends on how you want to define London - as Graeme says, by the tightest definition you have the City of London, going wider you have the GLA area, then the Greater London Built Up Area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London_Built-up_Area) which is used for some statistics.

But moving beyond that you could say that anywhere from which people commute from to London by surface transportation three times a week or more (*) was effectively an exurb of London - which probably means everything east of Bristol, south of Doncaster and north west of Lille

* Commuting by jet being somewhat extreme

Then there was NSE Weymouth, Salisbury (Exeter) Bedwyn Didcot Banbury, Peterborough, Kings Lynn etc.

Have found a new London and South East Map on:

http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/London_South_East_0518-b.pdf (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/London_South_East_0518-b.pdf)

 Which seems to go as far north as Birmingham, Bedford, Peterborough and Kings Lynn but doesn't included  Norfolk and and Suffolk.and only West as far as Swindon, Charlbury! Castle Cary! and Yeovil for GWR, but it does include Corfe Castle!

"How do you define London?" or Bristol, New York, or even Melksham, is a recurring theme on the citymetric website. eg: https://www.citymetric.com/skylines/where-are-largest-cities-britain-1404
That lists:

• municipal boundaries
• continuously built-up zone
• primary urban areas
• metropolitan areas

There are others, one of which relevant to the question of transport would be Travel to Work Area, which is calculated statistically by civil service boffins.

Looking at it from the outside. Many years ago I was in a pub in Yorkshire and was asked where I was from. Reading as a reply elicited the response Oh you mean London. I got the impression that as far as they were concerned England was split in two; there was Yorkshire and the rest was London.

The cruise companies define Southampton as London.  Probably due to our American cousins not understanding that there are other places apart from capital cities?

Warner Brothers London Studio Tour is located in Watford.

https://londonist.com/2015/09/do-you-live-in-london

I was born in a London suburb which was part of Kent at the time, but had become part of Greater London by the time I was a teen. If I'm asked where I'm from I still say London half the time and Kent the other half, without any reasoning behind why in each case. To me, it is sensible to define London as the built up area, so the suburbs are part of London, but villages and towns still slightly separated by green space are not. So Slough, Watford and Dartford are not London, but West Drayton, Stanmore and Erith are.