The City of London

What the City is, and what it is not

The City of London is not a part of London in the way that Camden or Southwark are parts of London. It is simultaneously a city, a ceremonial county — the smallest in England by both area and population — and a local government district, and it is governed by a body older than almost everything around it. Its area is 1.12 square miles, or 2.90 square kilometres, about seven hundred and seventeen acres, having been extended slightly on 1 April 1994. Inner Temple and Middle Temple sit inside the boundary as enclaves with their own arrangements.

The 2021 census counted 8,583 residents. The working population is in the hundreds of thousands, but the published estimates differ by enough — from around half a million to something approaching seven hundred thousand — that no single figure deserves to be quoted as fact.

Two things commonly placed in the Square Mile are outside it. The Tower of London stands in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, beyond the eastern boundary, and Borough Market is in Southwark, across the river. Blackfriars Bridge, by contrast, lies wholly within the City. St Paul's Cathedral is the City's own.

How it is governed

The City of London Corporation is the local authority. Its primary decision-making body is the Court of Common Council, which meets nine times a year and has a hundred Common Councilmen drawn from the twenty-five ancient wards; full elections are held every four years, most recently in March 2025. Alongside it sits the Court of Aldermen, one alderman for each ward, who must stand for re-election at least every six years and whose only qualification is to be a Freeman of the City.

The thing most often got wrong about the Corporation is who leads it. Political leadership rests with the Policy Chairman, a post held since May 2022 by Chris Hayward. The Lord Mayor does not run the City in that sense at all.

The Lord Mayor

The Lord Mayor of London and the Mayor of London are entirely separate offices, and confusing them is the other standard error. The Mayor of London is a directly elected political figure with a budget and a mandate across Greater London. The Lord Mayor is non-partisan, serves one year, presides over the two Courts, and functions chiefly as an international ambassador for financial and professional services.

The method of choosing is unchanged in essentials since the fifteenth century. Liverymen of the livery companies vote at Common Hall in Guildhall on or near Michaelmas Day, by show of hands, and since 1435 the choice has had to fall on a serving alderman — in practice one who has already served as a City Sheriff. Because the City is a ceremonial county, it has a Commission of Lieutenancy headed by the Lord Mayor rather than a Lord-Lieutenant, and two Sheriffs rather than a High Sheriff.

The office changes hands in November, so any statement about the holder needs a date attached. Dame Susan Langley took office on 7 November 2025 as the 697th holder, the third woman to hold it after Dame Mary Donaldson in 1983 and Dame Fiona Woolf in 2013, and the first to be styled Lady Mayor. Bronek Masojada was elected the 698th and takes office at the Silent Ceremony in Guildhall on 13 November 2026, with the Lord Mayor's Show the following day. The Show has fallen on the second Saturday in November since 1959, and the procession goes to the Royal Courts of Justice, where the new Lord Mayor swears allegiance to the Sovereign before the High Court judges.

The business vote

The City is the only place in the United Kingdom where businesses vote in local elections, and the arrangement is more substantial than it sounds: business electors are roughly two-thirds of the whole electorate. It is governed by the City of London (Ward Elections) Act 2002, which greatly enlarged a franchise that had existed in narrower form before.

There are three routes to a vote: occupying non-domestic property with a rateable value of at least ten pounds, residence in the ward, or appointment by a qualifying body according to the size of its workforce. A body with up to fifty staff appoints one voter for every five workers; above fifty it gets ten voters plus one for each further fifty. Companies, sole traders, partnerships, charities, churches and hospitals with a physical presence all qualify, and those appointed vote as individuals rather than as the organisation.

Two further peculiarities. City voters are exempt from the photographic identification requirement that applies at other elections in the United Kingdom. And competition is thin: fourteen of the twenty-five wards were uncontested in 2025, against six in 2022, with turnout in the contested wards ranging from about eleven per cent to about forty-nine.

The police

The City of London Police is a territorial force in its own right, established by the City of London Police Act 1839 and quite separate from the Metropolitan Police. It is the smallest territorial force in England and Wales by both area and headcount.

Its governance is unlike anywhere else. There is no Police and Crime Commissioner, and the City lies outside the Mayor of London's policing office: under the 1839 Act the Court of Common Council is itself the police authority. It delegates day-to-day oversight to a Police Authority Board but retains the appointment of the Commissioner.

Since 2014 the force has been the national lead for fraud and economic crime and runs the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau. The reporting service formerly called Action Fraud no longer exists under that name: it was replaced by Report Fraud, which went live on 4 December 2025 and launched fully in January 2026, covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Smithfield: the museum, and the markets

The London Museum — formerly the Museum of London, which closed its London Wall building in December 2022 — opens at Smithfield on 28 November 2026. The first phase occupies the restored Victorian General Market and is arranged in three parts: an entrance zone, a ground-floor social space, and the permanent galleries below ground, which sit alongside live Thameslink tracks visible through glass. The permanent galleries are free; walking in is possible, but a free timed ticket is advised, particularly in the opening weeks. The Cheapside Hoard goes on permanent display. An exhibition on Roman London follows in the spring of 2027, and the second phase, in the adjacent Poultry Market, is due in 2028 with temporary exhibition space, a learning centre and a collections store.

The building the museum left is to come down. A judicial review of the Corporation's approval of the London Wall West scheme — which involves demolishing the old museum and Bastion House and replacing them with three office buildings — was dismissed by the High Court in March 2026.

London Museum Docklands is open under its new name at West India Quay, free, with nine galleries.

As for the markets themselves, the version in wide circulation is out of date. Smithfield and Billingsgate are relocating, not closing. After the Corporation abandoned a move to Dagenham Dock in 2024, Albert Island in the Royal Docks was named the preferred site in December 2025, the markets to be renamed New Smithfield and New Billingsgate. The move depends on a private Bill at Westminster and on planning permission in Newham, so it is not yet a settled thing.

The towers, and which of them exist

Writing about the City's skyline tends to treat consented schemes as though they were built. What is actually standing is a shorter list. 22 Bishopsgate, at 278 metres over sixty-two floors, was completed in 2020 and is the tallest building in the City. 8 Bishopsgate, at about 204 metres, followed in 2023, and 1 Leadenhall Street, at about 165 metres, in 2025. Under construction at present is 2 Finsbury Avenue, in two towers, the second due in 2027.

Everything else is consent without a building. One London — the scheme at 1 Undershaft, rebranded in 2026 — received full planning consent in December 2025, but the former Aviva Tower still occupies the site and construction is planned for 2028. Its height is quoted inconsistently, around 290 to 295 metres above ground or 309.6 metres above Ordnance Datum, and the two measures are rarely distinguished. It is to carry a free public viewing gallery and an educational space on its upper floors, curated by the London Museum, with a public garden lower down.

100 Leadenhall Street was consented as long ago as July 2018 and has not started; accounts giving it a 2023 construction start are wrong. 85 Gracechurch Street was approved in a revised form in July 2025 and is in pre-construction, with completion scheduled for 2030. 55 Bishopsgate and 99 Bishopsgate are likewise approved and unstarted.

The plan, and the argument about the skyline

The City's emerging development plan is City Plan 2040, and it is not yet adopted: the plan in force remains the Local Plan 2015, alongside the London Plan. The inspectors' report, dated 7 October 2026 and published a week later, found the plan unsound as submitted but sound and capable of adoption with main modifications. The Corporation is aiming to adopt it before the end of 2026. Its own planning policy pages were still giving summer 2026 as the expected date well into the autumn, which is a useful warning about relying on them.

Two things in the plan matter beyond planning circles. It sets a target of a net increase of 1.2 million square metres of office floorspace between 2021 and 2040. And its tall buildings policy confines them to defined areas — the City Cluster, Fleet Valley and Broadgate — with a new Broadgate site capped by height above Ordnance Datum rather than above street level.

The heritage argument came to a head in September 2026, when the Housing Minister withdrew a ministerial holding direction with immediate effect after the Planning Inspectorate concluded that the City's approach to tall buildings near the Tower of London World Heritage Site struck a better balance between heritage protection and economic growth than the alternative Historic England had proposed. That is a notable outcome: the national heritage adviser argued for more restraint and did not get it.

Looking out over it

The City holds an unusual concentration of free high viewpoints, and travel accounts habitually name one or two of them and stop.

Horizon 22, on level 58 of 22 Bishopsgate, is free and the highest of them; booking ahead is advised, with about a tenth of places held back for people arriving on the day. The Garden at 120, on the fifteenth floor at Fen Court, is free with no booking at all, and closes on bank holidays. The Lookout, on level 50 of 8 Bishopsgate, is free and often takes people without booking; it is the one most often left out. Sky Garden, at 20 Fenchurch Street, is also free but requires an advance ticket, released weekly up to three weeks ahead — and its own notices warn that a visitor lift is out of service and capacity reduced, so it is worth checking before setting out.

The Monument charges, and is the odd one out in another way: tickets are sold only at the Monument itself, on the day. It is 311 steps and capacity-limited, so queues are normal, and school groups can fill the late morning in term time. Joint tickets with Tower Bridge are advertised by resellers; no official one exists.

The Roman city, and the halls

Two pieces of Roman London are open and free. The remains of the amphitheatre lie beneath Guildhall Art Gallery and are covered by the same admission as the gallery, one ticket serving for either or both. The London Mithraeum, in the basement of Bloomberg's building on the temple's own site, is free and closed on Mondays. A third is coming: a public display of the Roman basilica found beneath 85 Gracechurch Street is expected with that development, around 2029 or 2030.

Guildhall itself is harder to pin down. Access to the Great Hall is subject to the functions held there, and the Corporation does not publish opening arrangements that can be relied on; the accounts in circulation are years old. It is worth asking the Corporation rather than turning up on the strength of them. Mansion House, the Lord Mayor's official residence, runs guided tours, but they must be booked in advance — nothing is sold at the door — and there are none in August, on public holidays, or when the house is in use. Leadenhall Market, the Victorian covered market off Gracechurch Street, is owned and run by the Corporation and open as usual.

The Barbican, and two dates

The Barbican Centre is open, the building and the library free to enter, and in the middle of a programme of works that will change how it operates for several years. Planning permission and listed building consent for the first phase of the Barbican Renewal programme were granted in March 2026. The phase was costed then at about £231 million, of which the Corporation had committed the greater part, and it adds no floor area at all — it is repair and access rather than expansion. Major works on site begin in 2027.

Two dates follow from that, and both will catch out anything written as though the place were static. The Conservatory — the tropical glasshouse above the theatre, at present open only a few times a month by free ticket — closes in early 2027 for a restoration of about three years, and is intended to reopen in 2030 as a free, step-free space open daily. And the Centre pauses most of its activity from June 2028 until 2029. The cinemas on Beech Street stay open through it, and a reduced programme continues with the resident orchestra and theatre companies, but a visit planned around the concert halls in those years needs checking first.