It's certainly not the biggest, but it is certainly not small.
Greater London is around 35 miles (about 60 km) across from west to east and contains just under 9 million people. The original London ('the City') is just a mile square. But like I said, this little square mile has a large metropolis surrounding it.
It's around 30 miles across if you take the whole of Greater London, and it will typically take an hour to get from the edge to the centre by public transport. But if you want to visit it, most of that is residential suburbs and the part in the centre that you'll actually want to see is much smaller. To illustrate, there are six Zones on London public transport and you pay by Zone. A tourist is unlikely to want to go outside Zone 1 in the middle.
What is commonly called London is really two towns:
The "City of London" is an area approximately 1 square mile just left of the geographic centre of the conurbation. This has it's own Lord Mayor and police force. It is where the bulk of the banks, exchanges and insurance companys live. The "City" as it's known is the original Roman settlement, began around 20BC.
There is also the City of Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament are located. This is slightly larger than the City of London but doesn't have its own police.
Greater London is the rest of it. This is just over 30 mile across from east to west (slightly narrower north to south). It is governed by its own council, law and order is kept by the Metropolitan Police, and it has an elected executive mayor (Boris Jonson). London is composed of many different boroughs which have their own councils, some have a mayor with more limitied powers than the Mayor of London.
As you walk across the 30 (ish) miles of "London" you will see the boundaries of these "cities" and boroughs shown on the street signs. In reality the main difference between the boroughs and cities comprising London is that the council tax varies between them. So you can have a situation where a person pays different taxes than his neighbour if a civic boundary happens to pass between their houses.
This makes London a microcosm of the governance structure of the United Kingodm overall. That is: confusing to those who don't live there, and expensively inefficient to those that do live there.
But one thing is certain - nobody should ever think that London (any of them) is typical of England or anywhere else in the UK. It is a cosmopolitan mixture of too many different cultures and languages, most of the popular culture of London does not exist ouside of its boundaries. It is also by far the most expensive place to live in the UK. So a visitor who only sees London must NOT ever say that they have seen Britain; they haven't.
London is among top 30 largest cities in the whole world. So yes, it is rather big and there is plenty to explore. Especially considering that it existed since the Roman Empire's times
Yes. It covers an area of 1,572 km2 (607 sq mi)
Over 8 million people live there. Commuters add to that figure every working day. Over 50 million journeys are recorded between 7 am and10 am each weekday.
More than 8.6 million population, the area of Greater London is 607 square miles
Greater LONDON is massive but The CITY of LONDON is ONE SQUARE MILE....
yes
