The Entire History of London

[00:00:00]50,000 people [music] cross London Bridge every day, walking directly above the spot where Roman engineers drove oak piles into a riverbed and accidentally created the most powerful city on Earth.

[00:00:15]Imagine standing in Trfalga [music] Square and turning back the clock. The buildings shrink. The streets turn to mud. Saxon traders.

[00:00:25]Roman soldiers until finally just a river and silence. Rome built it.

[00:00:31]Vikings burned it. Fire ate it. Bombs flattened it. London should have died five times. Instead, it became the largest city on Earth. Using AI trained on paintings, records, and archaeology, we've brought every era back to life.

[00:00:50]2,000 [music] years, one video.

[00:00:53]This is the entire history of London.

[00:01:01]2,000 years ago, there is no London.

[00:01:05]Just a gray tidal river twice as wide as today and marshland as far as the eye can see. People do live here. Britain's farm the high ground in what is now Wimbledon, Ilford, and Eping Forest. But this soggy stretch of riverbank worthless. Nobody builds here. Nobody wants it. Yet this exact spot hides a secret. Between two low hills, the tempames turns narrow [music] enough to bridge, but stays deep enough for ocean ships. For thousands of years, nobody notices. Then in the summer of 43 AD, boats appear off the coast of Britain.

[00:01:49]The boats are Roman.

[00:01:53]Hundreds of them.

[00:01:56]40,000 soldiers. The invasion of [music] Britain has begun. But when Rome reaches that narrow point in the river, they don't build a city.

[00:02:06]They build a bridge.

[00:02:08]Oak [music] piles driven into the riverbed on almost the exact spot where London Bridge stands today.

[00:02:16]Rome builds bridges [music] to move armies. This one moves everything else.

[00:02:21]The roads of the new province converge on this crossing. Traders come, then soldiers, then merchants from Gaul, sailors from Spain, craftsmen from Italy. A boom town [music] erupts on the North Bank. timber houses, warves, warehouses stuffed with wine and olive oil. They call it Londinium.

[00:02:44]Within a decade, 10,000 people live here. No walls, no defenses. Why would they need any?

[00:02:53]They're about to find [music] out. In the year 60, Rome flogs a widowed queen named Buudaca and assaults her daughters. Her tribe rises, then another, then tens of thousands of warriors, burning everything Roman as they move south. And Londinium has no army. The governor [music] makes a cold decision. The city cannot be saved.

[00:03:18]Those who can't flee are left behind.

[00:03:20]Buudaca burns Londinium to the ground.

[00:03:25]Dig meters beneath the streets of the city [music] of London today, and you'll hit it. a layer of red scorched earth.

[00:03:34]The fire is [music] still in the ground 2,000 years later. London was barely [music] a decade old and it was already dead. But Rome doesn't retreat. Rome answers in stone. The city is rebuilt.

[00:03:50]Not as a trading post this time, but as a statement, a forum with a basilica, the largest [music] building north of the Alps. bathous, a governor's palace, an amphitheater roaring with 7,000 spectators.

[00:04:06]Walk these streets at the peak around [music] the year 120, and you'd hear a dozen languages before breakfast.

[00:04:13]Perhaps 60,000 people, merchants, soldiers, slaves, priests, packed into the greatest city Britain has ever seen.

[00:04:23]>> [music] >> Londinium isn't just surviving. It's the capital. But [music] empires age. And you can see the fear arrive in London in stone.

[00:04:34]Around the year 200, a shrinking city builds the largest wall in Roman Britain. 3 km long, 85,000 [music] tons.

[00:04:43]Cities at their peak don't build walls like this. Frightened [music] ones do.

[00:04:49]Trade thins. Buildings empty. The empire is bleeding elsewhere. And every decade, a little less of it reaches Britain.

[00:04:59]Then in 410, a letter [music] arrives from the emperor himself.

[00:05:04]Rome can no longer protect you. Defend yourselves. The legions march [music] out. No battle, no fire. The greatest city in Britain simply empties.

[00:05:16]And [music] for the next 400 years, almost no one will dare to live here.

[00:05:25]For generations, the ruins just stand there. The [music] new people of Britain, the Saxons, know the city exists. They see the walls from the river, but they will not move in.

[00:05:37]The Saxons are farmers, village people.

[00:05:40]They build in timber and thatch, and they have no use for a stone [music] labyrinth they can't repair.

[00:05:46]But it's more than practical. To them, these silent ruins feel [music] wrong, haunted. Saxon poets look at Roman stonework and call it the work of giants.

[00:05:59]Because surely no human could build this. They won't live in the ghost city.

[00:06:05]So they ignore it. A new London rises on the open riverbank [music] just west of the walls.

[00:06:13]They call it Londonvvic.

[00:06:17]Today it's buried [music] under Covent Garden and nobody walking there has any idea.

[00:06:24]And it works. By the 700s ships crowd the beach. Amber from the Baltic. Wine and millstones from the Rhineland.

[00:06:34]Pottery from France. A monk named Bead describes it as [music] a market of many nations. 10,000 people. No walls. No defenses.

[00:06:46]Sound familiar?

[00:06:48]Because across the North Sea, other men have heard about the wealth of Britain [music] and they're building ships.

[00:06:55]In 842, Viking long ships come up the tempames.

[00:07:00]The chronicles record what happens next as [music] the great slaughter.

[00:07:05][screaming] [screaming] 9 years later they return with 350 [music] ships and then the raids stop being raids. A Viking great army winters in London itself and Saxon England is [music] collapsing kingdom by kingdom.

[00:07:28]One king refuses to fall. Alfred of Wessix, the only English-born king history would ever call the great. He fights the Danes to a standill. In 886 he retakes London.

[00:07:43]And then he makes a decision that redraws the map forever. He looks at open, defenseless Londonvic and abandons it. He moves everyone back inside the haunted Roman walls because fear of the Vikings has finally beaten fear [music] of the ghosts. After 400 years, the old city lives again. Londonic [music] is left to rot. People call it simply the old settlement. Eldic. say that for a thousand years and it wears down to old witch. It's still a street in central London today. Inside the repaired walls, London hardens into the strongest fortress town in England. So valuable that Danish and Saxon kings will fight over it for more than a century until a pious king named Edward [music] builds something new. A great abbey on marshy ground west of the city, Westminster.

[00:08:40]From this moment, London has two hearts.

[00:08:43]The city for money, Westminster for power. It still does. Then in January [music] 1066, Edward dies without an heir. And across the sea, a duke insists the throne was promised to him.

[00:09:03]The Duke's [music] name is William, but the crown goes to someone else. Harold Godwinson. The man standing at Edward's deathbed, brother of the queen, the most powerful noble [music] in England, and the dying king's own choice. He is crowned the very next day in the brand new abbey, the same day Edward is buried in it. Harold will be king for 9 months, and they might be the hardest 9 months any English king has ever lived. Because that autumn, England is invaded twice.

[00:09:35]In September, a Norwegian [music] army lands in the north.

[00:09:40]Harold marches his men nearly 200 miles [music] and annihilates it.

[00:09:45]This was the battle of Stamford Bridge.

[00:09:48]The last great [music] Viking invasion of England.

[00:09:52]The age that began with long ships on the Tempames ends here. 3 days later, a second messenger. The Normans are ashore in the south. Harold's men have just fought the battle of their lives.

[00:10:05][music] Now he marches them the length of England to fight another.

[00:10:10]On the 14th of October 1066 near Hastings, the last Saxon King of England falls in battle and on Christmas Day, William the Conqueror is crowned in Edward's Abbey at Westminster.

[00:10:28]It does not go smoothly.

[00:10:31]When the crowd [music] inside shouts its acclamation, the Norman guards outside mistake the roar for a riot and start setting houses on fire. William is crowned [music] king of England while London burns around the church. It's an omen for the relationship because William has a problem. He's conquered England, but he doesn't trust its largest city.

[00:10:55]And London [music] is too rich to punish and too powerful to ignore. So [music] he does two things. He grants Londoners a charter confirming their ancient rights. The parchment [music] still exists today. And then in the same breath, he builds something in the city's [music] southeastern corner to remind them who's in charge. A colossal keep [music] of pale stone, 90 ft high, unlike anything England has ever seen.

[00:11:23]The White Tower, [music] the heart of the Tower of London, and it has watched over the city without interruption [music] for nearly a thousand years. A charter in one hand, a fortress in the other.

[00:11:36]That's the deal. And for the [music] next four centuries, all of medieval London lives inside it. Kings squeezing the city for money, the city squeezing [music] back for rights, and the city has plenty to squeeze with.

[00:11:52]In 1176, [music] London starts building a bridge to replace the old timber crossings in stone. It takes 33 [music] years. When it's finished, Old London Bridge is unlike anything in Europe. 19 arches and along its [music] length, an entire street, houses, shops, even a chapel suspended over the rushing temps. People are born on the bridge. People live and die on the bridge. And from 1305, the heads of traitors stare down from spikes [music] above its gate house. The first belongs to William Wallace.

[00:12:31]By now, [music] London is a city of church bells. Over a 100 parishes packed inside the walls, all beneath old St. Paul's whose spire climbs higher than any building in England. And beneath the bells, money. The guilds, mercers, goldsmiths, the fishmongers [music] of Billingsgate. By 1215, they matter so much that when the baronss corner King John at Runny, London's mayor stands among them, seal in hand, not a nobleman, a merchant. From now on, the city chooses its own leader. A merchant's son like Richard Wittington can rise to run London four times.

[00:13:11]>> [music] >> Yes, Dick Whittington was real. 80,000 people packed into one square mile, the largest city in England three times over.

[00:13:26]And in the autumn of 1348, ships bring something new up the temps.

[00:13:32]Nobody understands [music] what it is.

[00:13:34]People simply start dying. First by [music] the dozen, then by the hundred, then faster than the living can dig. The city opens emergency burial grounds outside the walls. At East Smithfield, the dead are not thrown into pits.

[00:13:50]They're laid out carefully, respectfully, in long trenches, five layers deep.

[00:13:58]You can only do that when you've run out of everything except care. In 18 months, the Black [music] Death kills around half of London. Half of everyone. And here's the strange [music] twist. For the survivors, life gets better. Workers are suddenly scarce, [music] so wages sore until the crown tries to claw it back with a brutal head tax. In 1381, tens of [music] thousands of furious peasants march on London and sympathizers [music] inside the city open the gates for them. They burn the Seavoy Palace to the ground.

[00:14:39]They storm [music] the Tower of London itself, the fortress built to be unstormable, and drag out the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[00:14:48]The revolt [music] dies with its leader, Watt Tyler, cut down at Smithfield.

[00:14:57]The tower has [music] been breached once. It will never be breached again.

[00:15:03]Instead, [music] it becomes something darker, a place where people go in and don't come out. Because for 30 years, [music] England tears itself apart. Two branches of the royal family, York and Lancaster, fighting for the crown in a war we now call the Wars of the Roses.

[00:15:24]London mostly watches [music] and banks the winners.

[00:15:29]But the war's final act happens here inside [music] the tower. In 1483, the king dies suddenly and the crown passes to his son, a 12-year-old boy. Following tradition, the young king is [music] lodged in the tower to await his coronation.

[00:15:46]His 9-year-old brother joins him. That summer, servants see the two boys playing in the tower gardens less and less and then never again. They are never seen again. What happened to the princes in the tower is still to this day England's most famous cold case.

[00:16:06]Their uncle takes the crown for himself, but he wears it for barely 2 years [screaming] before losing it along with his life on a muddy battlefield far from London to a Welsh exile almost nobody in England had heard of.

[00:16:31]His name is Henry [music] Tuda.

[00:16:38]The Welsh exile becomes King Henry VIIIth and his first master [music] stroke isn't one on any battlefield. He marries Elizabeth of York, the sister of the two boys who vanished in the tower.

[00:16:51]The white rose and the red rose become one. The Tudtor have arrived.

[00:16:58]For 24 [music] years, Henry does something no English king has managed in living memory. nothing dramatic. He counts money. He builds [music] quietly.

[00:17:09]And he hands his son the safest throne in a century.

[00:17:14]That son is Henry VIII.

[00:17:19]And Henry wants the one thing all his father's gold can't buy, a son of his own. When the Pope refuses [music] to dissolve his marriage, Henry does the unthinkable. He breaks England away from the Catholic Church and declares himself head of a new one. Now, everywhere else in England, that's a story about religion. In London, it's a story [music] about real estate because as much as a third of this city belongs to the church, monasteries, [music] priories, friaries, convents, vast walled precincts of gardens and closters sitting on the most valuable land in England. And in 1536, Henry begins taking all of it. Within 5 years, every monastery in London is gone. The buildings are demolished [music] or sold. the monks pensioned off or worse the land carved [music] up into mansions for the men who stayed loyal. It is the biggest transfer of property in London's entire history. And the strange thing is you can still hear it. Black friars, a Dominican priaryy.

[00:18:29]White friars, Spittlefields, the fields [music] of St. Mary's Hospital. And Covent Garden, that was literally the Covent Garden. the walled vegetable patch of Westminster Abbey. The monks are gone. Their names [music] never left. Stand on the South Bank in the year 1600 and look across the river. This is TUDA London in its final [music] years and the city Elizabeth will leave behind.

[00:18:58]The skyline is still medieval, a forest of church spires beneath old St. Paul's.

[00:19:05]But look closely at the cathedral.

[00:19:07]Something is missing. [music] Its great spire, once the tallest in Europe, is gone. Struck by lightning in 1561, it burned and collapsed through the roof and [music] was never rebuilt. The tower stands strangely flat topped, a broken crown over the city. And the city beneath it is bursting. Houses climbing four, five stories, leaning over streets [music] that were never widened. The warves stretch further every year, packed with ships from ports no Londoner's grandfather had ever heard of. The old Roman wall still stands, still guarded at night. But London has finally outgrown [music] it. For the first time in a thousand years, the city is spilling past [music] its walls and building in the fields and connecting everything as it has for three centuries.

[00:20:06]The bridge.

[00:20:09]Old London Bridge is at the peak of its strange life.

[00:20:13]The houses on it [music] now rise six, seven stories.

[00:20:17]And at its southern end stands its most famous TUDA landmark. Non such house. A wooden palace four stories high, prefabricated [music] in Holland, shipped over in pieces, and assembled on the bridge with wooden pegs. Not a single nail. A flat pack palace standing on a 400year-old [music] bridge over a rushing river. Still the only way to cross [music] the temps on foot. And the city keeps growing. Trade with Russia with the Levant with the new world.

[00:20:52]Refugees pouring in from Europe's religious wars, bringing skills, weaving, printing, banking. In one century, London quadruples 50,000 people to 200,000.

[00:21:07]And on the very last day of the century, December the 31st, 1600, a group of London merchants signs a charter [music] for a new venture. They call it the East India Company. It will one day rule half a billion people.

[00:21:25]But there's a problem with all this growth. The city fathers are strict men.

[00:21:31]Plays, gambling, bear baiting, banned inside the walls.

[00:21:37]So Londoners simply cross the river.

[00:21:41]Bankside, today's Suk, directly across the bridge, is the city's shadow. Beyond the reach of the order, everything forbidden thrives. the bear pits, the taverns, and a strange new invention called the Playhouse.

[00:21:59]In [music] the winter of 1598, one theater company loses the lease on its playhouse north of the city. So, they do something extraordinary. They dismantle the entire building beam by beam over Christmas while the landlord is away, carry the timbers through the streets and across the river.

[00:22:23]and raise them again on Bankside.

[00:22:28]They call it the Globe.

[00:22:30]A 20sided [music] ring of oak and plaster open to the sky.

[00:22:35]Three galleries stacked around a bare stage. It holds 3,000 people, a penny to [music] stand in the yard. More for a seat under the thatch. No scenery, no lighting, just [music] words.

[00:22:50]And the words come from the company's own house playwright, a Glover's son from Stratford named William Shakespeare. Hamlet is [music] first staged here. So is King Lear, the most famous theater in the history of the world.

[00:23:08]Built from secondhand timber in the neighborhood the city was ashamed of.

[00:23:13]Then in6003, [music] Elizabeth, the last Tudtor, dies without a child.

[00:23:20]The crown passes north to her Scottish cousin, King James.

[00:23:26]He inherits the greatest city in Europe, and within 2 years, a group of men will pack 36 barrels of gunpowder beneath his throne.

[00:23:39]It's the night before Parliament opens, midnight, the 4th of November,605.

[00:23:46]A search party moves through the cellars beneath the House of Lords by lantern light and finds a tall man standing guard over a stack of firewood. Under the wood, 36 barrels of gunpowder.

[00:24:01]In his pocket, matches. His name is Guy Forks. One day later, and he would have erased the king and England's entire ruling class in a single second.

[00:24:14]Instead, London [music] lights bonfires in celebration. It still does.

[00:24:20]Every 5th of November, 400 years later, the city James [music] rules is now the largest in Europe.

[00:24:29]400,000 people. Coaches jam streets built for handcarts. And take a good look at those streets because they matter. Timber houses jettied [music] story over story. Roofs of thatch, warehouses of pitch, tar, oil. London isn't just a city. It's a city made of fuel. The new king's son, Charles, believes God appointed him. So, parliaments, taxes, consent optional.

[00:25:01]London disagrees. In 1642, Charles marches soldiers into the Commons to arrest five members. They've already slipped away into the city which refuses to hand them over. The king leaves his own capital. He will only return to die. Civil war splits England and London picks Parliament. The whole city digs. An 18 km ring of trenches and forts. Tens of [music] thousands working with shovels. Women and children among them. The defenses are never attacked.

[00:25:36]They don't need to be.

[00:25:39]London's money grinds the king down until there's nothing left to fight with.

[00:25:46]And then Parliament does something no one in Europe believes possible. They put their king on trial. In Westminster Hall itself, the same [music] vast Norman Hall his ancestors built where kings held their coronation feasts. A king now sits as a prisoner refusing to even remove his hat. We can still see the Westminster [music] where it happened drawn from life just 2 years earlier from across the river. The great hall, the abbey rising behind it, and the little parliament house [music] that Guy Forks once tried to erase. The men inside it have now done what Forks never [music] managed. They have condemned the king. 3 days later, on the coldest morning in memory, Charles's walked from St. James's [music] palace across the frozen park to Whiteall. Drums beating around him the entire way.

[00:26:43]And there [music] he steps through a window onto a scaffold beneath the ceiling he himself [music] commissioned, celebrating the divine right of kings.

[00:26:53]One blow of the axe.

[00:26:58]11 joyless [music] years later, England gives up on revolution. The dead king's son comes home to ringing bells. The theaters reopen. And a young Navy cler named [music] Samuel Peeps starts keeping a diary. Lucky for us, because Peeps is about to witness the two worst years in London's history.

[00:27:21]1665, summer. People start dying in the parish of St. Giles. This time there's a system. Infected houses are shut up, the living locked in with the [music] dying.

[00:27:34]Doors painted with a red cross. Lord have mercy upon us. Carts collect the dead by night. The court flees.

[00:27:44]The rich flee. Peep stays and rights of grass growing in the streets of Whiteall. At the peak, over 7,000 [music] deaths in a single week. By winter, around 100,000 Londoners are dead. One in [music] five. The survivors think God's anger is spent.

[00:28:08]September the 2nd, [music] 1666.

[00:28:12]1:00 in the morning. A bakery on Pudding Lane catches [music] fire. The Lord Mayor is woken, scoffs that a woman could put it out, and goes back to bed.

[00:28:24]But it hasn't rained in months, and a gale is blowing from the east. By morning, 300 [music] houses are gone, and the fire has reached the riverside warehouses. The pitch, the tar, the oil.

[00:28:40]Now it's [music] a firestorm, generating its own wind, leaping streets, moving faster [music] than men can pull houses down ahead of it. For 3 days, London burns [music] end to end. On the third day, it takes old St. Paul's. The heat splits its stones like gunfire. The lead roof melts and runs down Lgate Hill. An eyewitness wrote that the very pavements glowed. When the wind drops, 4 days, 13,200 houses, 87 churches, nearly 90% of the walled city, the London of Chaucser, of Wittington, of Shakespeare gone, 100,000 homeless, and the official death toll, six. The bridge survives. [music] The tower survives.

[00:29:36]But medieval London, six centuries in the making, has ceased to exist in [music] 96 hours. And while the ashes are still warm, a 33-year-old astronomy professor is already walking the ruins with a roll of paper under his arm. He has a plan.

[00:30:00]The man with the role of paper is Christopher Ren, astronomer, [music] mathematician, and barely an architect at all. His plan is magnificent. Wide avenues, grand [music] piazas, a rational city of stone drawn up while the ground is still hot. and London rejects it because every [music] burned plot still has an owner and a 100,000 homeless owners [music] can't wait for a masterpiece.

[00:30:31]So London rebuilds fast on its old medieval street lines. Walk the city today and the streets still wander like a village because underneath they still are one. The fire destroyed the buildings. It couldn't destroy [music] the map. But Ren gets the skyline, 51 new churches, and on the hill where the old cathedral died, his masterpiece.

[00:30:58]35 years of construction, a dome unlike anything in England, rising over the rooftops like a second son. St. Paul's finished in 1711. [music] And Ren, almost 80, lived to see it. He's buried inside. The rebuilt city soon gets new masters, too. In 1714, the crown passes to a German cousin, George, then his [music] son, George, then his grandson, George, then his son, George. A century under [music] one name, which is why everything from this era, the town houses, the squares, the elegant terraces, still carries it today, Georgian. [music] And the Georgian city runs on a new fuel, coffee. A penny a cup and London's coffee houses become offices, newsrooms, and trading floors all at once. In one of them, a man named Lloyd hosts ship owners swapping gossip about [music] voyages. It becomes Lloyds of London. In another, brokers [music] thrown out of the Royal Exchange for being too rowdy set up shop. It becomes the stock exchange. Modern finance isn't born in a palace. It's born over caffeine in the ashes of the fire. Not every fuel is so gentle. In the 1720s, London discovers cheap gin and nearly drinks itself to death. Drunk for a penny, the signs promise. At the crazes peak, one house in four in some slums sells it. And some winters the city throws a party on the river itself. The old bridg's arches slow the temps so [music] much that in hard frosts it freezes solid and Londoners build a city on the ice. Storms, taverns, oxro roasts, printing presses selling souvenirs.

[00:32:50]Frost fairs held on a river that today never freezes.

[00:32:55]The bridgeg's [music] reign is ending though. In 1750, Westminster Bridge opens. The first new crossing in 500 years.

[00:33:05]Within a decade, old London Bridg's houses are pulled down. After six [music] centuries, the street over the river becomes just a bridge. The century has one last fire in it. In 1780, a protest against Catholic rights explodes into a week of rioting, the worst in London's history. New Gate Prison is stormed and burned, its prisoners freed [music] into the night. Hundreds die before the army retakes the streets.

[00:33:38]And then in 1801, Britain counts itself for the first time. The census reaches London, 1 million people. The village by the bridge is now the greatest city in the Western world. The first million soul city since ancient Rome. Only Beijing on the far side of the planet is still bigger. It won't be for long.

[00:34:03]3 years after [music] the census, London loses its oldest friend. In 1831, [music] old London Bridge, 600 years old, the street over the river, the survivor of the [music] great fire, is finally demolished. And with its arches go the Frost Fairs. With the river flowing free, the tempames will never freeze solid [music] again.

[00:34:26]It's the right symbol for what's coming because the next 70 years [music] will replace almost everything.

[00:34:34]In 1834, the old palace [music] of Westminster, the medieval Warren Guy Forks failed to blow up, burns to the ground by [music] accident, an overheated stove.

[00:34:45]In its place rises the building the whole world now pictures when it thinks [music] of London, the Gothic Houses of Parliament and a clock tower with a 13ton bell, [music] Big Ben.

[00:35:01]And in 1837, an 18-year-old girl inherits [music] the throne. Her name is Victoria. She will reign for 63 years, and everything [music] built in them will carry her name. What she inherits is a monster. London doubles, then doubles again. 2 million people, 4 million, six. The largest city in the history of the human species. And nobody has ever run anything this size before.

[00:35:29]The rich west [music] end glitters with gas light and stucco.

[00:35:35]3 mi east, families of eight share single rooms. A young reporter named Charles Dickens [music] walks these streets at night and turns what he sees into novels that make the whole world look.

[00:35:49]And what's feeding the monster [music] is steam. Britain has become the world's first industrial nation. And everything it makes, ships and urns, flows through London. Railways punch into the city from every direction. Nine great stations in [music] 40 years. Entire neighborhoods demolished to make way for them. The docks swell [music] into the warehouse of the planet. Tea, timber, wool, silk. A forest of masts stretching for miles below the bridge.

[00:36:21]And the coal that powers it all hangs over everything.

[00:36:25]In the fogs, the world will come to call London fog.

[00:36:30]And the monster has a problem. Every drain in London empties into the tempames, the same river the city drinks. Cholera kills tens of thousands.

[00:36:40]And nobody knows why until a doctor [music] named Jon Snow. Yeah, I know.

[00:36:46]Not that Jon Snow maps the [music] deaths around a single water pump and proves the unthinkable.

[00:36:57]London is poisoning itself.

[00:37:00]Then comes the summer of 1858.

[00:37:03]Hot, dry, and the river becomes an open sewer so foul that Parliament in its brand [music] new building soaks its curtains in chloride of lime and debates fleeing the city. They call it the Great Stink. It takes the smell reaching the powerful to unlock the money. An engineer named Joseph Basiljette gets the job and builds the largest civil engineering project the world has seen.

[00:37:30]Over a thousand miles of sewers, embankments that reshape the river itself. And quietly, he doubles [music] every pipe's capacity beyond what anyone thought necessary. "We're only going to do this once," [music] he said. His sewers still serve London today.

[00:37:48]The city solves its traffic the same [music] way, by doing something no city had ever dared. In 1863, London [music] opens the world's first underground railway. Steam trains in tunnels under the streets. People predict suffocation.

[00:38:05]Instead, [music] 9 million journeys in the first year. [snorts] Every metro on Earth, Tokyo, New York, Paris, descends from [music] this hole in the ground. But the monster keeps its shadows. In the autumn of 1888, in the East End's [music] poorest streets, a killer the newspapers named Jack the Ripper murders at least five women and is never caught. The world's first [music] media panic. The city that invented the modern police force, taunted in its own headlines, and still it grows. Tower Bridge [music] rises in 1894.

[00:38:47]A drawbridge dressed as a Gothic castle.

[00:38:50]Instantly the city's front door.

[00:38:54]By 1900, [music] 6 million people. One human being in every 250 alive lives in London. Then in January 1901, Victoria [music] dies and an entire way of life seems to end with her. Her city has never been richer. Her empire has never been larger. And the 20th century is about to test both.

[00:39:20][music] The new century introduces itself politely.

[00:39:27]Motor cars, electric trams, the empire at its absolute peak. Then one night in 1915, Londoners look up and see a shape in the search lights. A German Zeppelin dropping bombs on a city that has never been touched by an enemy in 800 years.

[00:39:53]The damage is small. The message is enormous.

[00:39:57]The sky is no longer safe [music] and the sky is where the next war will come from.

[00:40:03]September [music] 1940, the Luftvafer arrives over London and then comes back every single night for 57 nights in [music] a row. Londoners do something no war plan predicted. They adapt. They sleep by the 100,000 on underground platforms. The tunnels that once carried them to work now keeping them alive.

[00:40:29]They cue for the morning train past [music] buildings that no longer exist.

[00:40:34]Shops blown open overnight paint signs more open than usual. But the worst night is [music] saved for the year's end.

[00:40:43]December 29th, 1940.

[00:40:46]The Luftvuffer targets the [music] old city itself with tens of thousands of incenduries. And London's second great fire begins. The square mile burns [music] exactly as it did in 1666, right up to the foot of St. Paul's. And there, history changes its [music] mind.

[00:41:05]On the cathedral roof, a volunteer fire watch smothers the incenduries as they land. Churchill's order is blunt. St. Paul's must be saved at all costs. And in the middle of the firestorm, a photographer on a rooftop catches the picture of the century. The dome rising untouched out of a sea of smoke and flame. In 1666, the cathedral was the fire's greatest victim. In 1940, it becomes the symbol that London doesn't die.

[00:41:38]The war grinds on and the deaths come without pattern.

[00:41:43]Flying bombs [music] whose engines cut out, followed by 12 seconds of silence before the blast.

[00:41:50]Rockets [music] faster than sound. The explosion arriving before the warning.

[00:41:55]>> By 1945, London has won. And it looks like it lost. Whole districts flattened.

[00:42:03]A third of the old city in ruins. The largest empire in history suddenly unaffordable.

[00:42:10]And the city has one more [music] killer waiting. One it built itself. December 1952.

[00:42:17]A freezing windless week. The cold smoke of a million chimneys. The famous London fog that Dickens wrote and tourists loved stops moving. For 5 days, the city breathes its own exhaust. Buses crawl behind men walking with flares. And when it lifts, thousands are [music] dead.

[00:42:38]The fog was never romantic. It was the industrial revolution presenting its bill. The coal age ends. The empire is ending. The docks are emptying. And for the first time in 300 years, London begins to shrink.

[00:43:00]It shrinks by 2 million people.

[00:43:04]The bomb sites stay empty. The empire dissolves. colony by colony and the docks, the warehouse of the planet, collapse in slow [music] motion.

[00:43:15]The ships grow too big for the old basins. The trade moves down [music] river and one by one the gates close.

[00:43:23]Even the new queen, crowned in 1953, [music] rides her golden coach through a city full of holes. But while the old city shrinks, a new one is quietly arriving.

[00:43:35]In 1948, a ship called the Empire Wind Rush docks at Tilbury, carrying hundreds of passengers from the Caribbean, invited to help rebuild [music] the mother country. More follow from Jamaica, from India, from Pakistan, from Cyprus, from Hong [music] Kong. They drive the buses, staff the new health service, open shops that never close.

[00:43:58]They get a cold welcome, and they stay anyway. and their children will make this the most international city on earth. The old capital still has [music] style. For one strange decade, the whole planet watches London. The Beatles [music] on a rooftop, miniskirts on Carnaby Street, a gray city suddenly in color. But swinging London is a costume over a struggling body. By the 70s, the last docks are closing for good. The aisle of dogs, once the busiest port on the planet, falls silent.

[00:44:33]>> Then in 1986, [music] the city takes off its bowler hat. They call it the Big Bang. In a single day, London's stock market scraps [music] its old rules, goes electronic, and explodes.

[00:44:47]Money floods in from everywhere. And on the dead docks of the aisle of dogs, something impossible grows. A second city of glass towers. Canary Warf skyscrapers full of the world's money.

[00:45:01]Standing exactly where the world's cargo used to land. The docks didn't die. They reincarnated.

[00:45:09]London relearns its oldest lesson. It doesn't survive by [music] staying the same. It survives by becoming something else. The new century tests it as every century [music] has. In 2005, terrorists bomb three tube trains and a bus. 52 Londoners from 18 different countries are killed. The city grieavves and the next morning gets on the tube. It has, after all, done this before. And then in 2015, a line quietly crosses on a graph.

[00:45:44]London's population passes its 1939 peak. The city that shrank for 40 years is bigger than it has [music] ever been.

[00:45:53]9 million people, 300 languages, still growing.

[00:45:59]>> Rewind this city and watch it [music] survive in reverse. Bombed for 57 nights, burned to the ground, decimated by plague, sacked by Vikings, abandoned by Rome, burned by Buudaca. Until 2,000 years ago, there's nothing left at all.

[00:46:19]Just an empty riverbank.

[00:46:21]Everything since, every death, every resurrection built this. 9 million people from every nation on Earth, living on top of 20 centuries. This was an absolute blast to research and make.

[00:46:35]I really hope you enjoyed [music] it.

[00:46:37]Now, these lads here promised me a trip to the Royal Pub. March.

[00:46:43]This was the entire history of London.