Westminster

In 2006, digging at St Martin-in-the-Fields found a group of late Roman graves. They suggest the site had been sacred since at least AD 350.

After Roman London emptied in the 400s, an Anglo-Saxon farming and trading settlement probably grew up to its west. It is sometimes called Lundenwic ('London village' or 'London port'). In the 600s the Covent Garden area became the heart of this trading town; it was abandoned at the end of the 800s and went back to fields. Digs in 1985 and 2005 backed up the idea that the settlement was here.

There was a monastery of Saint Peter here before the 1000s, and in the 900s the church became a Benedictine abbey and a royal church. Between 1042 and 1052 King Edward the Confessor began rebuilding Saint Peter's Abbey as a royal burial church for himself. It was finished around 1060 and consecrated on 28 December 1065. Only its foundations survive today.

After the Norman Conquest of 1066, William the Conqueror took the Palace of Westminster as his own, and he was crowned in Westminster Abbey. Since William's coronation in 1066, 40 English and British monarchs have been crowned there.

A document from about 1200 mentions a walled garden owned by the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey. By the 1200s it was 40 acres of orchard, meadow, pasture and farmland, later known as 'the Convent Garden'. A document from 1515 calls it 'a garden called Covent Garden'.

On 6 July 1245 work began on rebuilding the abbey church for Henry III, under his master mason, Henry of Reynes. By 1261 Henry had spent over £29,000 on it. At a ceremony on 13 October 1269, Edward the Confessor's remains were moved to the shrine behind the main altar, where they still are.

The abbey's chapter house was built between 1250 and 1259. At nearly 60 feet (18 m) across, it is one of the largest in Britain. From 1257 Henry III held meetings of local representatives there, which came before the House of Commons.

In 1265 Simon de Montfort's parliament, the first to include representatives of the major towns, met at the Palace of Westminster. In 1295 Edward I called the 'Model Parliament', the first official Parliament of England, and almost every Parliament since has met at the Palace.

In 1296 Edward I captured the Stone of Scone, on which the kings of Scots were crowned. From 1301 it was kept in the Coronation Chair in the abbey. Since 1996 it has been kept at Edinburgh Castle, and it comes back to the chair for coronations.

Marylebone's church of St John the Evangelist, probably built in the 1100s, was robbed again and again. In 1400 a new church was built further north and named St Mary by the Bourne. Over time the name became St Marylebone.

Geoffrey Chaucer, who worked as Clerk of the King's Works and had rooms in the abbey, was buried there around 1400. He was the first poet in what became Poets' Corner. Edmund Spenser was buried nearby in 1599, and in the 1700s memorials were put up to writers buried elsewhere, such as William Shakespeare and John Milton.

In 1470, during the Wars of the Roses, Elizabeth Woodville, the wife of Edward IV, took sanctuary at Westminster Abbey while her husband was deposed. She gave birth to Edward V in the abbot's house.

In 1512 a fire destroyed the royal living quarters of the Palace of Westminster. In 1534 Henry VIII got York Place from Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a powerful minister who had lost the king's favour. In 1536 Henry took the land at Soho as a royal park for the Palace of Whitehall.

In the 1530s Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church in Rome and took control of England's monasteries, including Westminster Abbey. In 1540 the abbey became a cathedral and Westminster was made a city. The diocese ended in 1550, but Westminster kept its city status.

In 1552 the young King Edward VI gave the old Convent Garden to John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, who had been a trusted adviser to Henry VIII. The Russell family kept the land until 1918.

In 1560 Elizabeth I made Westminster Abbey a 'royal peculiar': a church that answers directly to the monarch rather than to a bishop. Westminster School counts her as its founder.

In the early 1600s the abbey hosted two of the six companies of churchmen who produced the King James Version of the Bible. By 1612 guides were showing visitors round the royal tombs for a penny.

In 1605 a group of Roman Catholic gentry plotted to kill the Protestant King James I and put a Catholic monarch in his place. They placed large amounts of gunpowder beneath the House of Lords, which one of them, Guy Fawkes, was to set off at the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. The plot failed. In January 1606 Parliament passed a law making services to remember it a yearly event; the law stayed in force until 1859.

In 1630 Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, asked the architect Inigo Jones to build a church and three terraces of fine houses around a large square, or piazza, at Covent Garden. It was the first modern square in London. The church, St Paul's, was begun in 1631 and is known as the Actors' Church.

The first record of a 'new market in Covent Garden' is from 1654, when traders set up stalls against the garden wall of Bedford House. In 1670 Charles II gave the Earl of Bedford a charter for a fruit and vegetable market every day except Sundays and Christmas Day.

In May 1662 Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary about street entertainment at Covent Garden. It is the first mention of a Punch and Judy show in Britain.

The first Theatre Royal on Drury Lane opened in 1663. The building there today, which opened in 1812, is the fourth. It is the oldest theatre in London still in use.

The name 'Soho' first appears around 1636. Soho Square was laid out in the 1680s on the old Soho Fields, and 41 houses had been finished there by 1691. From around 1680 immigrants began to settle in the area, especially French Huguenots after 1688.

The Royal Opera House began as the 'Theatre Royal', built in 1732 to a design by Edward Shepherd. The first ballet there was in 1734, and Handel's first season of operas began a year later. Today's building is the third on the site, after fires in 1808 and 1857.

Mozart lived in Soho as a child, in 1764 and 1765. A plaque above the stage door of the Prince Edward Theatre marks the place.

The Marylebone Cricket Club was formed in 1787. In 1814 it moved a short way to its present home at Lord's Cricket Ground, and for many years it was the governing body of world cricket.

The old market of wooden stalls and sheds had become disorganised, so in 1813 the 6th Duke of Bedford asked for an act of Parliament to regulate it. In 1830 Charles Fowler designed the neo-classical market building that is still the heart of Covent Garden today.

On 16 October 1834 a fire broke out in the Palace of Westminster. An overheated stove, used to get rid of the Exchequer's pile of tally sticks, set fire to the House of Lords chamber. The fire destroyed the Houses of Parliament.

The first stone of the new Palace, designed by Charles Barry and Pugin, was laid on 27 April 1840 by Barry's wife, Sarah. Pugin, an expert on the Gothic style, had to send in his designs under other architects' names, because he had become a Roman Catholic and designs in his own name would have been rejected.

In 1854 there was an outbreak of cholera in Soho. John Snow's study of it was an important moment in the history of public health. In 1992 a copy of the pump was put up near the original, without a handle, to show Snow's action to stop the outbreak.

Westminster had been a centre of royal power since Saxon times, but it was not formally made a borough until 1 November 1900. A royal charter gave the new borough city status.

Covent Garden tube station opened on the Piccadilly line in 1907. The 300-yard (270 m) ride from Leicester Square is the shortest in London.

John Logie Baird first demonstrated television in his laboratory in Soho in 1926. The site is now Bar Italia.

On 26 September 1940 a bomb fell into Old Palace Yard and badly damaged part of the Palace of Westminster. On the night of 10–11 May 1941 the abbey's roof and grounds were hit by incendiary bombs. A bomb in 1941 also destroyed the roof lantern over the centre of the church. The lantern was restored in 1958.

Soho's music scene goes back to 1948 and Club Eleven, generally seen as the first place in the UK where modern jazz, or bebop, was played. Ronnie Scott's jazz club opened on Gerrard Street in 1959 and moved to Frith Street in 1965.

Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in the abbey in 1953, on the Cosmati pavement. A portrait of her standing there is on show in the abbey's Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries.

The Marquee Club opened on Wardour Street in 1958. In the 1960s many major rock bands played there, including early shows by the Rolling Stones in July 1962 and The Who in late 1964.

In 1965 the modern City of Westminster was formed by joining the old boroughs of Westminster, St Marylebone and Paddington. In 1966 it was given the right to have a lord mayor.

In the 1950s cheap rents on Gerrard Street attracted Chinese Londoners, many of whom moved from Poplar. By 1970 the street had become the centre of London's Chinatown. It was made traffic-free and decorated with a Chinese gateway and lanterns.

By the end of the 1960s traffic jams made the square hard to use as a wholesale market, and big changes to the area were planned. After protests by the Covent Garden Community Association in 1973, dozens of buildings around the square were listed, which stopped the redevelopment. In 1980 the central building reopened with cafes, pubs, small shops and a craft market, and the London Transport Museum opened in the old flower market.

On 29 April 2011 the abbey hosted the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. On 6 May 2023 the coronation of Charles III took place there.