Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall

Note this is about the City of London, an entity much smaller and older than the modern city known as London. It's land area is about 3 km^2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".

I had a hard time remembering that distinction when I first read about the "City of London".

Here is the US, the "city of Chicago" is the same as "Chicago".

See also: The Loop

New York is an obvious example of two entities of the same name, with the “City of” version being a small part of the larger version. It’s just on a much bigger scale.

New Orleans is a city, but City of New Orleans is a train

And the other terminus is Chicago, thus bringing us full circle. Line. Loop. Whatever.

For further confusion, ‘London’ does not exist at all as a well defined entity and the UK has no de jure capital.

For even further confusion "London" actually contains two cities: London and Westminster. London was a walled city but Westminster was not. So "London" was we know it today is more like Westminster than London.

What is the exact job of the mayor of London then?

Buying and selling cats for profit, since 1423.

For the people that don't know the City of London history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Whittington_and_His_Cat

> Note this is about the City of London

Not really. It’s about the Roman wall. It happens to be both in Greater London and around the City.

> Title should probably read "the City of London" rather than "London".

There’s only one Roman city wall in London, it is not ambiguous.

That’s the Lord Mayor of London. The Mayor of London is The head of the Greater London Authority (which is not a city). No, it is not confusing.

What about Southwark?

That has a cathedral too.

For further confusion there are two cities within the (historical) county of London - the city of Westminster and the city of London.

A cathedral is neither necessary nor sufficient for city status. City status in the UK is given by the monarch and that's all there is to it. Cambridge is a city without a cathedral and Bury St Edmunds is a town with a cathedral.

Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.

The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.

City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.

Indeed. Southend got city status mostly because their MP was murdered.

UK is a country made up of 4 countries, I guess we really like to annoy anyone trying to define a hierarchy

"And by 'country' we mean a sovereign state that is a member of the UN in its own right"

As is Southwell.

And the US the a sovereign state made up of 50 states. They used to be called that because they were independent countries

There are other offenders, but the US and UK together are probably the main reason English no longer has concise but unambiguous way to refer to sovereign states

CGP Grey has an informative video on the City of London:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

> They used to be called that because they were independent countries

The latter part is true of exactly one US state (Hawaii), but otherwise false. They are called that because they are political bodies capable of international relations. The 13 founding states were British colonies; Florida, New Mexico and Texas were famously Mexican and/or Spanish colonies, and the western half of the continental states were French colonies (though largely unexplored by France, so only nominally held).

The (US) Port of Toledo wants to join the discussion.

Even though a large part of its inhabitants don't realize it has a port.

You'll have to be more specific, there are at least two, a couple thousand miles apart.

I like Fairfax, VA. It is surrounded by, but not part of, Fairfax County, VA. Despite this, it still serves as the county seat.

I believe GP is technically correct in several ways. The first 13 states were mostly independent and sovereign under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 until 1789, when the US Constitution superseded it and established a much more significant central government.

Texas was an independent republic from 1836 until US annexation at the end of 1845. Although Mexico did not recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, numerous other countries did.

California is more of an edge-case. It was arguably an independent republic for a few weeks in 1846. And a similar story with Florida: the Republic of West Florida existed for a couple months in 1810. But both of these cases were basically small uprisings that weren't broadly recognized by other countries.