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JOSEPH WARD: I'm Joe ward. I'm the dean of the college of humanities and social sciences at Utah State University and also a professor of history.

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My specialty area is the History of London in the 16th and 17th centuries. London was the capital of England in every sense during the 16th and 17th century.

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It was the political, religious, social, economic, and cultural hub of the country. If we're looking at London from the north, if we're on Hampstead, in 1600, the river

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is going to immediately grab our attention. London is unimaginable without the Thames and the development largely on the north, but prominently on the south as well connected by the bridge.

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From east to west, the tower is still going to be quite prominent, and we can see the outlines of the ancient wall around the city to the north.

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Westminster, very distinct from the rest of the ancient city. But during the 17th century, the area is going to get built up and it's going to increasingly appear to be one integrated metropolis.

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Prominent within the city, of course, is going to be the Cathedral, which will burn down in 1666, the great fire and be rebuilt. So Saint Paul's that we think of today,

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many people need to remember, has been rebuilt in very different architectural style than the mediaeval Cathedral it replaced. So the tower, the Cathedral, Westminster, the wall,

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the bridge, and the river, which ships at anchor to the east and a fleet of small boats moving up and down the river, crossing the river. The river is going to be really a crucial aspect

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of the metropolis. The Thames was essential to London. It was the connector to trade, it was the source of so many crucial commodities

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for daily life. London is really unimaginable without the Thames. When I think about London in the 17th century, when I'm sitting in the archives and imagining life for people,

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I'm always struck by what it must have sounded like. The noise, the traffic in the streets, the narrow streets with carts and sometimes horses and other animals and the cacophony, it must have been to modern ears,

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overwhelming. The smells, the smoke, the cooking fires, the fires used in different manufacturing, the sights, I mean, London is a place of neighbourhoods.

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So many Londoners in their daily lives may not have travelled much beyond their parish, but still they could have seen just through foot traffic. In any aspect of their daily life,

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people who were unfamiliar, people who might have different types of attire, different kinds of foods and materials. So London, in a daily context, it

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must have been a very stimulating place for the men and women who lived there. The metropolis expanded several times between 1450 and 1750. But it's important for us to keep in mind

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it was not a smooth graph. Tremendous number of outbreaks of plague, the bubonic plague, which was endemic and would flare up every few years and kill thousands didn't end until the great fire

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in the 1660s. So in order for the metropolis to grow despite the tremendous disease regime, required constant inflows of migrants

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both from the English countryside and abroad. So London is a place of constant demographic change. And I think for modern people to think about living in a place that underwent such upheaval on a regular basis,

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disaster was familiar to the people of London in the 16th and 17th centuries. So the basic demography of London, in order for it to grow the way that it did,

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the movement of people into the city was constant. The London of 1750 was much more integrated into an international, a global economic system than was the case in 1450.

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Historians often speak about the emergence of the Atlantic world, which is all about connecting the people of Europe and Africa with the people of what we think of as north and south America. And London was at the forefront of that change.

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And so the economic vitality that underpinned the growth of the metropolis, what attracted people from the countryside was the economic dynamism of London, which by 1750 was now much more integrated

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into a global economic system. For the metropolis itself, the physical manifestation of this growth was an urban conurbation. So in 1450, you could have seen very distinctive neighbourhoods

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and settlements. By 1750, it's much more of a fully-developed metropolis with very little open space separating one neighbourhood from another.

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I also suspect strongly that an observer of the metropolis would immediately recognise how much more, what we think of as the east end with the docks, the anchorages, all the warehouses that supported shipping

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and trans-shipping, that was going to be far more prominent in 1750 than would have been the case in 1450. Even though metropolitan London increasingly operated as an integrated social and economic society,

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the City of London was politically distinct and the livery companies continued to have considerable influence in the political life of the city.

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But people came and went. Any sense of boundary between the city and the metropolis easily permeated. And by 1750, many of the distinctive qualities

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of city and suburb I think had largely dissolved. You think about Samuel Pepys and his wonderful commentary in his daily life and how he moved from place to place, yes, neighbourhoods had distinctive characteristics.

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But the idea that you were in the city of London or now you're in a suburban area, I think those distinctions were less and less meaningful as time went on.

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With the countryside more generally, London was a place that drew people, drew commodities, raw materials, and sent out finished goods, sent out commodities that had been imported from abroad.

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So there's a sense that there's a regional network of communication, roads, coaches, migrants that as time goes on, is increasingly connected not only to continental Europe

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but to the larger Atlantic world. So London is distinct in many ways as a metropolis, but it is fully integrated into the larger national and international contexts.