This social history gives accounts of life in London, the people who inhabited it, the petty quarrels and jealousies that arose between various factions, and the gradual emergence of the city into one of the world's great cultural, political and financial centres. It tells the whole story of the people of London from Roman times to the present day, including new material on Roman and Saxon London. It constantly reminds us of the sites that still remain, some from the medieval period which set the whole shape of the city we know, while much of the 17th- and 18th-century London still survives.