What is London?

I've decided that all of my posts will start with a random photo from somewhere in London, just to give a flavor of what we experience as we go about our humble business. Here is one from yesterday, from the neighborhood of Canonbury, in Islington:

Incidentally, we were in Islington to have dinner with Danny's very kind and generous adviser, who took us to Ottolenghi. While the restaurant isn't strictly vegetarian, Yotam Ottolenghi is the main vegetarian recipe contributor for The Guardian, so he clearly knows what he's doing. It was truly delicious.

But on to the main point of this post, which is to explain exactly what I mean by "Canonbury, in Islington", which is in London. I thought a geography/terminology primer would be useful before we write too much about different parts of London.

First, lets start with the collection of islands that lives to the north of France. All of these islands are collectively referred to as the British Isles. Within the British Isles are the country of Ireland and the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland," or UK for short. Great Britain is mostly a geographic designation, meaning the areas on the main island: the countries of England and Scotland and the principality of Wales. The UK is what gives rise to the main political body, as parliament contains representatives from Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales. In other words, David Cameron is the prime minister of the United Kingdom, rather than of England or of Great Britain.

All that being said, I tend to throw around terms like "England", "UK" and "Britain" very loosely. I'll try to be specific when it matters, but generally I just mean "This strange new place where I currently live."


Okay, on to the nitty gritty of London. London is divided into 32 boroughs, plus the very small City of London in the middle of it all. Each borough has its own local government that oversees things like libraries, schools, public housing, etc. Within each borough are multiple, charmingly-named districts that roughly correspond to a postal code (or occasionally two). Shall we talk about the wonder that is London postal codes? I think we shall. When we went to the bank to update Danny's old account with our new address, all we needed to provide was our address number and our 6-character postal code. The first 3 letters/numbers of the postal code designate the district, and the last 3 essentially give the street name. What this means is that you can find yourself on google maps by simply typing your house number and your postal code, not even the city or the country. It's remarkable.

So to sum up, we live in the district of Dartmouth Park (postal code NW5), which is on the northern edge of the borough of Camden, in the city of London, in the country of England, in the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom, which can all be summarized in 7 characters.

This post is dedicated to my dad, who has instilled in me a love of postal codes.