[2] The borough is unique in London in having three professional football clubs: Chelsea, Fulham and Queens Park Rangers.

The area of the modern borough broadly corresponds to the ancient parish of Fulham, which was historically part of the county of Middlesex.

The manor (estate) of Fulham can be traced back to the seventh century when it was granted to the Bishop of London.

[4] From 1856 the area was governed by the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was established to provide services across the metropolis of London.

[9] Fulham saw industrialisation and urbanisation from the start of the 19th-century, with the establishment of the world's first energy utility company, at Sands End in 1824, followed by road and rail transport development to the east of the borough.

Vacant land by the new railway sidings on the boundary with Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council led to the development of the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, visited by Queen Victoria in 1879 when she attended Bill Cody's Wild West Show at West Brompton.

There followed numerous international fairs and exhibitions for a century until the construction of Earls Court II in the borough in the 1980s.

At the other end of today's borough, in 1908, the Franco-British Exhibition and Olympic Games were hosted in Hammersmith, at White City, London, but the site then took many decades to be redeveloped.

60% of the borough's population is White British, 20% white non-British (among which are large French, Polish, Portuguese and Irish communities), 5% black Caribbean, 8% black African with various other ethnicities (including Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Chinese) making up the remaining 11 per cent.

The borough comprises a patchwork of extremely affluent as well as some less affluent neighbourhoods; The areas of Fulham, Parsons Green, Brackenbury Village, Brook Green, Ravenscourt Park and the Riverside compose of highly expensive Victorian and Edwardian houses, contrasting to the areas of White City and Shepherd's Bush.

[24] CE Europe, a subsidiary of Capcom, has its head office in the George House in Hammersmith in the borough.

The borough has a proud sporting heritage going back to at least the second half of the 19th-century when the fledgeling Amateur Athletic Association of England came to the Lillie Bridge Grounds, followed there by football, boxing and First-class cricket.

The men's 1st XV currently compete in London's NE2 League with the remainder of the sides participating in the Middlesex Merit Tables.

In March 2011, the main forms of transport that residents used to travel to work were: underground, metro, light rail, tram, 26.8% of all residents aged 16–74; bus, minibus or coach, 8.8%; on foot, 8.8%; driving a car or van, 8.2%; bicycle, 5.1%; work mainly at or from home, 4.2%; train, 3.1%.

The borough is also home to the Hammersmith Apollo and O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire, which play hosts to major concerts and stand-up comedy performances.

[34] The Borough Archives, open to the public Mondays and Tuesdays, staffed mainly by volunteers, are accessed in Hammersmith Library.

When that school was threatened with closure Lady Margaret was established in September 1917 by the redoubtable Miss Enid Moberly Bell.

The Commission's Controller, Howard Davies, realised that the council had put all of its positions on interest rates going down and ordered an investigation.

Although they did not agree, the commission preferred the opinion that it was ultra vires for councils to engage in interest rate swaps (ie.

The auditor and the commission then went to court and had the contracts declared void (appeals all the way up to the House of Lords failed in Hazell v Hammersmith and Fulham LBC); the five banks involved lost millions of pounds.