Divinity Atlas

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London

Also Known As Londoner
United Kingdom

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London has been the administrative center of English Christianity since the medieval period, with St Paul's Cathedral as the seat of its bishop and Westminster Abbey, upriver in Westminster, as the coronation church of English and British monarchs since 1066. The break with Rome under Henry VIII made the city the working capital of a state church whose supreme governor is the monarch, and the dissenting congregations that grew up outside it, among them Quakers, Baptists and Methodists, did much of their organizing there. It is today one of the most religiously plural cities in Europe, with large Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish populations and long established mosques, mandirs and synagogues alongside its parish churches.

Facts
Origins
Founded
Founded as Londinium about 47 CE, refounded by Alfred in the ninth century and the capital of England since the medieval period 1
Origin of the Name
The name Londinium is first recorded by Tacitus around 115 to 120 CE; its root is a pre-Roman Brittonic name of disputed meaning, not a Latin coinage. 1
Attributions
Tradition
The Roman cults attested at the Walbrook mithraeum; Latin Christianity, and the Church of England after the break with Rome; the Nonconformist churches; a Jewish community expelled in 1290 and readmitted from 1656; and one of the most religiously varied populations in Europe today 2
Traditions
Sacred and Liturgical Languages
Latin in the medieval church and English since the Reformation, with Hebrew, Arabic, Gujarati, Punjabi and many others in the city's present communities 3
Learn More
Westminster, St Paul's and a Church by Law Established

Two churches carry the weight of English religion in London and neither is quite an ordinary cathedral. Westminster Abbey was refounded by Edward the Confessor and consecrated days before his death; every English and British coronation since 1066 has taken place in it. It is a royal peculiar, answerable to the sovereign rather than to a bishop, which is a constitutional arrangement as much as a religious one. St Paul's is the cathedral of the diocese, and the churchyard of the medieval building held Paul's Cross, an open air pulpit where royal proclamations and set piece sermons were delivered to crowds, making it the closest thing Tudor England had to a national platform.

The break with Rome turned the city into the working capital of a state church. The monasteries were dissolved and their London houses turned to other uses, the Book of Common Prayer put a single vernacular liturgy into every parish, and the monarch became supreme head and later supreme governor of the church. That settlement was enforced. Protestants were burned at Smithfield under Mary, and Catholic priests were executed at Tyburn under Elizabeth and her successors, so the city holds martyrs venerated by both sides of the same argument.

Old St Paul's burned in the Great Fire of 1666, and Christopher Wren replaced it with a domed building that is Protestant in its plan, an auditory church built for preaching to a seated congregation, in a shape borrowed from Catholic Rome.

Dissent, Resettlement and a Plural City

What grew up outside the established church mattered as much as what happened inside it. Bunhill Fields, on the edge of the City, was the burial ground for those who would not use the Prayer Book service, and John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts and William Blake all lie there. Across the road stands the chapel John Wesley built in 1778, near the meeting in Aldersgate Street where he described his heart being strangely warmed in 1738, an event Methodists count as the beginning of their movement.

Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Readmission came informally under Cromwell in the 1650s, and the Bevis Marks synagogue, opened in 1701 by the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, has held services ever since without interruption, the oldest in Britain still in use. Nineteenth and twentieth century migration from eastern Europe made the East End the centre of Jewish London before the community moved north and west.

One building in Brick Lane tells the rest of the story on its own. It was built in 1743 as a chapel for Huguenot refugees, became a Methodist chapel, then in 1898 a synagogue for the Jewish population of the streets around it, and since 1976 has been the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. The East London Mosque nearby is among the largest in Europe. The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir at Neasden, built in the 1990s from carved Indian stone, and the gurdwara at Southall serve communities that are now several generations old.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names London directly: "death at Chitambo in 1873, the London Missionary Society, Paris Evangelical and White Fathers missions, and the interwar Watchtower or Kitawala movements."

Source A History of ZambiaAndrew Roberts

This source names London directly: "Conference at Wesley's Chapel, London, in 1881, when roughly four hundred delegates from thirty Methodist bodies gathered, the decision in 1931 to organise a standing Council, and the 1951 renaming..."

Source About Us (World Methodist Council)World Methodist Council

This source names London directly: "Samoa in the 1830s through the London Missionary Society, and Congregationalist teaching became so thoroughly woven into fa'a Samoa, the Samoan way of life, that village governance and church life..."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names London directly: "human rights body founded in London in 1961 by the lawyer Peter Benenson, growing out of his newspaper appeal on behalf of two Portuguese students imprisoned for a political toast."

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)Encyclopaedia Britannica editors

This source names London directly: "as having predicted the Great Fire of London fifteen years in advance."

This source names London directly: "at the Gorsedd ceremony he staged in London in 1792, and Morganwg presented it as a survival of ancient druidic tradition, a claim modern scholars regard as substantially his own romantic invention..."

London holds the administrative center of the Church of England, with St Paul's as its cathedral.

This source names London directly: "rabbi Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in September 1655 to press for the readmission of Jews to England, appealing to millenarian hopes stirred by the Commonwealth's Puritan government."

Exodus, Musical Works

This source names London directly: "Marley and the Wailers, recorded in London during 1977 after Marley survived a December 1976 assassination attempt in Kingston, and released by Island Records on June 3, 1977."

Source Exodus, Bob Marley and the Wailers album (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "attempt on Marley and his exile to London, and Time magazine's 1999 designation of the album as album of the century."

Source Exodus, Bob Marley and the Wailers album (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "Transactions of the Royal Society of London, in which Herschel reported detecting heating rays beyond the red end of the visible spectrum, the discovery that would later be named infrared radiation."

This source names London directly: "Society of Genealogists was founded in London to set professional standards of source citation."

This source names London directly: "in Halle and died April 14, 1759 in London, buried in Westminster Abbey."

Source George Frideric Handel (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "1957, weeks before his sudden death in London."

This source names London directly: "intellectual figure until her death in London in 1891, and its account of hidden spiritual authority became the direct root of the later Ascended Master teachings and much of the wider New Age..."

Source The Theosophical EnlightenmentJoscelyn Godwin

This source names London directly: "founded by Cambridge academics in London in 1882."

This source names London directly: "of Advanced Study at the University of London, tracing its origin as Aby Warburg's private library in Hamburg, its 1933 flight from Nazi Germany to London, and its subsequent standing as a center..."

Source History of the Warburg InstituteWarburg Institute

This source names London directly: "and the Royal College of Physicians, London, a primary document from 1852 digitized and hosted by PubMed Central under the US National Library of Medicine, reproduces a letter from the College's..."

This source names London directly: "Beatty's 1915 account published by Hugh Rees, Ltd., London, is a primary colonial trial record that presents the alleged secret society of human leopard killings as established fact."

This source names London directly: "and development charity established in London in 1994 by Mirza Tahir Ahmad, then worldwide head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, to provide aid on the basis of need alone, irrespective of race..."

This source names London directly: "issued together in March 1739 in London, printed by William Strahan and sold by James Hutton and at Mr."

Source Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739 (Hymnology Archive and Wikipedia)Hymnology Archive and Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "Amaury Talbot's 1912 ethnographic account from William Heinemann, London, documents the religion and social life of peoples in what is now southern Nigeria, drawn from Talbot's own colonial-era..."

Source In the Shadow of the BushP. Amaury Talbot

This source names London directly: "Ariel Hessayon, Department of History, Goldsmiths, University of London, tracing Jewish presence in England from Edward I's 1290 Edict of Expulsion through centuries of clandestine and crypto-Jewish..."

This source names London directly: "January 28, 1944 in Wembley Park near London and died November 12, 2013, was an English composer known almost entirely for choral and instrumental works on explicitly religious themes."

Source Composer Biographies (Britannica, Wikipedia and Publisher Program Notes, Compiled 2026)Compiled from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Wikipedia and publisher concert-program notes

This source names London directly: "and Sebele's 1895 deputation to London against Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company, by a former professor of history at the University of Botswana."

This source names London directly: "The London law firm Lewis Silkin LLP conducted the investigation and published its report on 22 August 2018."

This source names London directly: "First published in London in 1702; its first American edition did not appear until 1820."

Source Cotton Mather Bibliography (Congregational Library And Archives)Congregational Library and Archives staff

This source names London directly: "His mother, Empress Jind Kaur, joined him in London in 1860."

Source British Sikhs (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "play, premiered at the Court Theatre, London, November 28, 1905 and first published in 1907."

Source Major Barbara (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "28, 1905 at the Court Theatre, London and was first published in 1907, and that its plot follows Barbara Undershaft, a Major in the Salvation Army, who resigns in protest when the Army accepts a..."

Source Major Barbara (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "Dutton in New York and Routledge and Kegan Paul in London, is the primary narrative source for Gurdjieff's own account of his formative travels."

Source Meetings with Remarkable MenG. I. Gurdjieff

This source names London directly: "history of Protestant, principally London Missionary Society, missions in the South Seas across that period, with Tahiti as its earliest and best documented case: marae destruction, and dance and..."

This source names London directly: "sources, the Dublin premiere and its London reception."

Source Messiah (Handel) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London on 24 May 1738, John Wesley felt his heart, in his own words, strangely warmed, an evangelical assurance of salvation he treated ever after as his own..."

This source names London directly: "and the piece was published in London the following year by the music historian Charles Burney, ending its long secrecy."

Source Miserere mei, Deus (Allegri) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "1666, weeks after the Great Fire of London, to explain hieroglyphic images he had published in 1651 that were by then being read as having predicted it."

This source names London directly: "Faulder in London in 1802, is William Paley's own primary text and the classic statement of the watchmaker analogy, arguing that the intricate design apparent in living organisms implies a designer..."

This source names London directly: "is a sociologist of religion at the London School of Economics and a leading academic authority on new religious movements, and this HMSO volume is her scholarly introduction to the field, written..."

This source names London directly: "Charles Hatchett found it in 1801 in a mineral sent to London from Connecticut and called it columbium, after Columbia."

This source names London directly: "Pakistan, and died August 16, 1997 in London, was a Pakistani vocalist and the most internationally celebrated performer of qawwali, the Sufi devotional music of the Indian subcontinent, in his..."

This source names London directly: "Garthwait in London, examines belief and disbelief in spirits, witches and supernatural claims of the period."

This source names London directly: "Smithson Tennant found it in London in 1803 in the residue left when platinum ore is dissolved, together with iridium."

This source names London directly: "Wollaston first sold it anonymously through a London shop, which provoked a public accusation of fraud from Richard Chenevix before Wollaston revealed himself."

This source names London directly: "book, published by Hambledon and London, an academic history press, surveys the practice of pilgrimage within medieval England, drawing on surviving records of shrines, indulgences and pilgrim..."

Source Pilgrimage in Medieval EnglandDiana Webb

This source names London directly: "Its notoriety comes from the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, in which polonium-210 was the agent."

This source names London directly: "at a meeting on Aldersgate Street, London, on 24 May 1738, and the open-air field preaching that followed."

This source names London directly: "in the Low Countries, Hambledon Press, London, 1990, is a standard academic collection by one of the leading scholars of the early modern Netherlands."

This source names London directly: "William Hyde Wollaston isolated it in London in 1803 from South American platinum ore, in the same series of experiments that gave him palladium."

This source names London directly: "(Vajrayana) Buddhism, founded in London in 1979 by Sogyal Lakar (Sogyal Rinpoche), author of the widely read Tibetan Book of Living and Dying."

This source names London directly: "1884 missionary ethnography from the London Missionary Society, is still cited as a primary source in current academic scholarship on Samoan eschatology for its account of the Pulotu myth, the ruler..."

This source names London directly: "by Tea Leaves, published in 1881 in London under the pen name A Highland Seer, is a classic public domain handbook of tasseography, listing the traditional symbol meanings read into tea leaf patterns."

This source names London directly: "January blessing of the river at London Bridge."

Source Thames: Sacred RiverPeter Ackroyd

This source names London directly: "Headquartered in Los Angeles and London, it is widely regarded by scholars of new religious movements as the first major UFO-based religion and remains one of the longest continuously operating..."

This source names London directly: "Tauris, London, 1994, is an academic monograph."

This source names London directly: "Mowbray in London in 1912, is the tradition's own authoritative account of its history and practice, written by one of its own senior hierarchs."

This source names London directly: "gathered at Wesley's own chapel in London in 1881 for the first Ecumenical Methodist Conference, seeking closer fraternal ties toward what the delegates called the conversion of the world."

Source About Us (World Methodist Council)World Methodist Council

This source names London directly: "Venner led a failed armed uprising in London in January 1661 to hasten the promised fifth monarchy."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names London directly: "Kennedy is a professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London, and the book works from the same documented chronicle tradition as his other narrative history in this catalog on the Islamic Near..."

This source names London directly: "scholarly study from Ithaca Press, London, published as Oxford Oriental Monographs No."

Source The Legend of Miao-shanGlen Dudbridge

This source names London directly: "published by Philip Wellby, London, is the standard early English-language account of the esoteric philosopher's life."

This source names London directly: "and Their Rituals, Joseph Masters, London, 1852, is a primary nineteenth century account, not a modern scholarly study."

Source The Nestorians and Their RitualsGeorge Percy Badger

This source names London directly: "and Foundation of the Royal Society of London is a scholarly historical study by a specialist in the history of early modern British science, tracing the intellectual and institutional circumstances..."

This source names London directly: "4, 1989 at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Isserlis as soloist and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oliver Knussen."

Source The Protecting Veil (Tavener) (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Thomas Becket, Sources

This source names London directly: "by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in London in 1986, is a scholarly biography of the twelfth century Archbishop of Canterbury whose murder in his own cathedral in 1170 made him one of medieval England's..."

Source Thomas BecketFrank Barlow

This source names London directly: "of the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1518."

This source names London directly: "Devon, and worked as a cooper in London before emigrating to New England in 1637; he returned to England some years later."

This source names London directly: "on the Wellcome Collection, the London museum and library of medical history, maintained through Wikipedia's ordinary community editing process rather than a fixed editorial board."

Source Wellcome Collection (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Westminster Abbey has been the coronation church of English and British monarchs since 1066.

This source names London directly: "present home at the National Gallery, London."

Source Wilton Diptych (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "Younghusband, its first congress in London July 3 to 17, 1936, and its interfaith fellowship mission."

Source World Congress of Faiths (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

This source names London directly: "in Monrovia, California and London, United Kingdom, and its staff draw on various Christian traditions and other faiths."

Source World Vision International (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Contained In

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Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005Entries: Anglicanism; Methodist Churches; Judaism in Northern and Eastern EuropeView the Source
3. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions
John Bowker (ed.), Oxford University Press, 1997View the Source
The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition
Oxford University Press, Oxford University Pressdemonym / adjectival formView the Source
Reformation: Europe's House Divided 1490-1700
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, 2003View the Source
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