I’ve recently been reading Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. It’s an excellent overview of the history of London, as told through a series of small historical essays. One of the most interesting parts for me personally was how London grew threw accretion as other towns melded into the capital and The City started to become Greater London.
But one of the central theses of the book is that, despite this growth, The City proper has always exerted special influence and been a unique place in the British cultural, political, and economic landscape.
This video provides a brief introduction to the unique status of London as “A City in a City in a Country in a Country”: