Westminster

Westminster includes the sub-districts of Soho, St James, Mayfair, Covent Garden, Pimlico, Victoria, Belgravia and Knightsbridge (shared with neighbouring Kensington).

The district's open spaces include: The development of the area began with the establishment of Westminster Abbey on a site then called Thorney Island.

The site may have been chosen because of the natural ford which is thought to have carried Watling Street over the Thames in the vicinity.

The legendary origin[4] is that in the early 7th century, a local fisherman named Edric (or Aldrich) ferried a stranger in tattered foreign clothing over the Thames to Thorney Island.

It was a miraculous appearance of St Peter, a fisherman himself, coming to the island to consecrate the newly built church, which later developed into Westminster Abbey.

Edric was instructed to present the king and St. Mellitus, Bishop of London, with a salmon and various proofs that the consecration had already occurred.

Every year on 29 June, St Peter's Day, the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers presents the Abbey with a salmon in memory of this event.

[5] A charter of 785, possibly a forgery, grants land to the needy people of God in Thorney, in the dreadful spot which is called Westminster.

[6] Between 1042 and 1052, King Edward the Confessor began rebuilding St Peter's Abbey to provide himself with a royal burial church.

Some of the lower parts of the monastic dormitory, an extension of the south transept, survive in the Norman Undercroft of the Great School, including a door said to come from the previous Saxon abbey.

Like many large parishes, Westminster was divided into smaller units called Hamlets (meaning a territorial sub-division, rather than a small village).

The area became larger and in the Georgian period became connected through urban ribbon development with the City along the Strand.

[13] The growing Elizabethan city had a High Constable, Bailiff, Town Clerk, and a keeper of the ponds.

Westminster has shed the abject poverty with the clearance of this slum and with drainage improvement, but there is a typical Central London property distinction within the area which is very acute, epitomised by grandiose 21st-century developments, architectural high-point listed buildings[16] and nearby social housing (mostly non-council housing) buildings of the Peabody Trust founded by philanthropist George Peabody.

Parishes and Places of the City and Liberty of Westminster. The lower Westbourne formed part of the western boundary, and Oxford Street the north.
St Peter's Abbey at the time of King Edward the Confessor 's funeral, depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry
The Metropolitan Borough of Westminster was almost co-terminous with the older City and Liberty of Westminster , with ancient Oxford Street as the northern boundary.
John Norden 's map of Westminster (1593)
Westminster City Hall , completed in 1965
B&W photo of Westminster from the air
Bird's-eye view of Westminster and the River Thames in 1909
Emanuel Hospital, Westminster, 1890 by Philip Norman
Part of Charles Booth 's poverty map showing Westminster in 1889. The colours of the streets represent the economic class of the residents: Yellow ("Upper-middle and Upper classes, Wealthy"), red ("Lower middle class – Well-to-do middle class"), pink ("Fairly comfortable good ordinary earnings"), blue ("Intermittent or casual earnings"), and black ("lowest class occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals"). Booth coloured Victoria Street, with its new shops and flats, yellow. The model dwellings built by the Peabody Trust on the side streets off Victoria Street appear as pink and grey, signalling modest respectability, while the black and blue streets represent the remaining slum areas housing the poorest. [ 15 ]