Distilling the essence of modern London into a chapter, one cannot help but be selective. I will focus on just four, interrelated aspects of London’s history: government, social geography, economy and Empire. It is clearly impossible to understand London without examining the ‘problem’ of London’s government: the relationship between central government, the Corporation of the City, London-wide authorities such as the Metropolitan Board of Works and its successor, the London County Council, and lower-tier authorities, initially parish vestries and district boards and, subse-quently, metropolitan borough councils. But making sense of debates about appropriate forms of metropolitan government demands a sensitivity to London’s changing social geography: a nineteenth-century contrast between poor East End and rich West End, subsumed in a twentieth-century contrast between working-class inner and middle-class outer London. Of course there are numerous qualifications to be made to this caricature, to take account of working-class suburbanisation, the survival of an elite West End and, more recently, a sporadic gentrification of inner London, and a City that shifted from mixed residential to almost exclusively non-residential in its pattern of land use.