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While the joke goes that English cuisine is not the envy of Europe, London boasts many eateries with succulent specialties, savory or sweet...

LONDON: QUIET LUXURY OF TIMELESS CULTURE
21 January 2006

London is often thought of as one of the world's great capitals, seething with millions upon millions from every corner of the world, known for its labyrinthine transit network and its multicultural makeup. Its museums, many of the best of which are free to the public, every day, stand as some of the most important reservoirs of cultural history in the world.

The city is as ethnically and politically diverse as the entire outside world, and a constant stream of new life, through immigration from the rest of the European Union and the British Commonwealth, keeps the city growing and changing in constant waves.

Its cultural life is vibrant, eclectic and seemingly boundless. There is a quiet luxury available to any visitor willing to take the time to find the out-of-the-way venues, the hidden masterpieces, the gems that invite intimate encounters with thousands of years of history and an expansive worldview.

London has been a capital since ancient times, when the pre-Roman settlers built up their communities along key turns in the River Thames. The Roman colonization of Britain brought wealth and discipline to the planning of the city, and organized its government according to the interests of the occupying power.

The Saxon invasion of the 5th century brought fragmentation to the edges of the Roman colony, and the territory was divided up into fractious fiefdoms under Saxon chiefs. Not until the 9th century did the English have a single monarch and a single realm. And in 978, King Aethelred II, issued the Laws of London to control the flow of currency in his realm, establishing London as the political and financial capital.

Aethelred fought Viking invasions for the rest of his reign, seeing London seized by a Nordic alliance, then returning to take back the city in 1013. In 1016, he died and was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, one of London's great architectural and historical treasures.

When Duke William of Normandy conquered Britain in the year 1066, London became the capital of an Anglo-Norman domain that gave rise to modern English language and culture. William's efforts to subdue the population's resistance to his invasion led to London supporting his rule in an effort to bring peace; he rewarded the city with a special charter, granting its people unique protection under his powers.

London has since been the legal, financial and cultural center of English society, where deep-rooted tradition clashed with the vanguard of each epoch, creating a metropolis that welcomes and caters to both competing sets of interests, even today.

During World War II, London suffered agonizing years under the Nazi Blitzkrieg, a near constant bombardment that left much of the city burned or deserted and thousands of civilians dead. The government did not, however, abandon the city, and many stayed to help keep the nation's economic and political engine running, as a matter of principle, and as a strategy for outlasting the attacks.

The cultures of peoples living in what is now England have shown a remarkable ability to persist, to blend and to evolve, despite serious threats to the integrity of their traditions: ranging from medieval conquest to armed rebellion in almost every century up till the 19th, and then afterwards in territories it controlled, to the black death, the Great Fire and the Blitz.

Some argue that hardship has conditioned the tastes and the manners of British society as much as aristocracy and the monarchy. Numerous specific laws and cultural peculiarities of present-day Britain do in fact have their roots in surviving wartime scarcity, disease and bombardment.

Nevertheless, while many continue to joke that English cuisine is not the envy of outsiders, and that a sampling of fine British cuisine entails a visit to an Indian restaurant, London boasts a wide array of some of the most well-appointed eateries, with savory and succulent plates in abundance. But, depending on your nose for a bargain, you may have to pay for quality.

The incomparable playwright and poet William Shakespeare, of Stratford upon Avon, staged his plays at the open-air Globe Theatre on London's south bank, setting a standard and compiling a portfolio of works which no other great writer has matched.

In the late 1990s, an organization set up to protect and to represent his work inaugurated the new Globe Theatre on Bankside, near the same site as the original where the Bard performed his fabled plays.

It would be difficult to find another example of a city oriented toward the art of drama: London's West End offers dozens of top-quality performances any day of the week, and new plays and musicals are constantly being introduced. Each season, audiences can enjoy a diverse serving of classic plays, re-staged by talented and sometimes very widely-renowned actors.

The British capital is increasingly accessible to travelers from many other nations, given its four busy international airports: Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Luton, at varying distances from the city. There is also the possibility of catching a train from Paris to Waterloo International rail station, right in the heart of the city. [s]