London, metropolis, capital of the United Kingdom. It is the various oldest of the arena’s terrific towns—its records spanning almost millennia—and one of the maximum cosmopolitan. By some distance Britain’s biggest metropolis, it is also the country’s economic, transportation, and cultural center. London is located in south-eastern England, mendacity astride the River Thames some 50 miles (80 km) upstream from its estuary at the North Sea. In satellite TV for pc images, the city can be visible to take a seat compactly in a Green Belt of open land, with its primary ring dual carriageway (the M25 motorway) threaded round it at a radius of about 20 miles (30 km) from the city center. The growth of the constructed-up region was halted by strict metropolis planning controls inside the mid-Nineteen Fifties.