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London reached a new level of importance during the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I
(1558 1603). From London's docks,
Elizabeth
sent out a navy to defeat the Spanish Armada, and explorers to chart a world empire. From her London court, Elizabeth also fostered a great flowering of the arts.
By the conclusion of the
Elizabethan Age,
London
had grown into a crowded city of narrow, twisting streets. The Great Fire of 1666 consumed much of the city. The famed architect Sir Christopher Wren oversaw its reconstruction and the addition of St. Paul's Cathedral. The 1700s brought the building of elegant mansions, and the 1800s saw the spread of London's industrial suburbs, with docks and shipping operations stretching for miles downriver. Nineteenth-century London also enjoyed great social reforms, including the establishment of an unarmed police force, known affectionately as the "bobbies." In 1890, London opened the world's first electric underground railway.
Destruction again rained on London during
World War II, when German bombs and rockets destroyed much of the city, killing thousands. In the following years, skyscrapers sprang up from the rubble. In 1968, the often-rebuilt London Bridge "fell down" once again. More accurately, it was torn down and shipped, stone for stone, to Arizona (as a tourist attraction), before being rebuilt out of concrete to handle modern traffic. Among the most dramatic changes in recent decades, great reductions in air pollution have largely lifted the dark fogs that had shrouded London's skies for centuries. |
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