Michael John Hebbert
Professor of Town Planning, Victoria University of Manchester, England. Coeditor of The London Government Handbook and others; author of London: More by Fortune than Design.
Primary Contributions (2)
city, capital of the United Kingdom. It is among the oldest of the world’s great cities—its history spanning nearly two millennia—and one of the most cosmopolitan. By far Britain’s largest metropolis, it is also the country’s economic, transportation, and cultural centre. London is situated in southeastern England, lying astride the River Thames some 50 miles (80 km) upstream from its estuary on the North Sea. In satellite photographs the metropolis can be seen to sit compactly in a Green Belt of open land, with its principal ring highway (the M25 motorway) threaded around it at a radius of about 20 miles (30 km) from the city centre. The growth of the built-up area was halted by strict town planning controls in the mid-1950s. Its physical limits more or less correspond to the administrative and statistical boundaries separating the metropolitan county of Greater London from the “home counties” of Kent, Surrey, and Berkshire (in clockwise order) to the south of the river and...
London: More by Fortune Than Design (1998)
Plague, fire, imperial collapse, the Blitz, Thatcherism ? London rises triumphant, still one of the brokers of the global economy and still one of the most liveable cities in the world. London is a city of villages. Six hundred square miles of streets stretch in every direction, home to an extraordinary range of ethnic and cultural groups. The domestic scale of the city?s architecture has always been one of its great attractions as has the number and variety of its parks and gardens. Yet this is...READ MORE