Families of London

Families seated in London

• KingWhen the village crowned someone 'king' for a day, and the jest lasted six centuries.
• MooreBy the moor, or sons of Mórdha; English heath and Irish sept under one Anglicisation.
• CooperThe cooper, cask and keg.
• ParkerThe parker.
• DickensSon of little Richard, London fog in print.
• RuskinVictorian conscience of craft.
• CarterThe carter, and the man who opened Tutankhamun's tomb.
• BarnesBy the barn.
• ButlerThe cellarer's name, and the Earls of Ormond of Kilkenny.
• PorterThe gate, the burden, same spelling.
• JohnsonSon of John, the most-Anglo-Saxon-sounding Norman name in the English census.
• AllenSon of Alain, the Breton first name carried to England by William's followers.
• MorrisSon of Maurice, the Norman name that took English root.
• BellOf the bell, locative, occupational, or pseudonymous.
• AndrewsSon of Andrew, apostle, patron saint, common name.
• HenryFrom Henry, the home-ruler Norman first name borne by nine English kings.
• GardnerThe gardener, keeper of the manorial garden.
• House of PlantagenetRoyal house of England, 1154-1485, the longest dynasty in English history.
• House of HanoverRoyal house of Britain, 1714-1901, the dynasty of empire.
• House of WindsorRoyal house of Britain, 1917 to today (and Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1901).
• GrosvenorDukes of Westminster, the wealthiest landowners in Britain.
• RothschildBankers of empire, peerage 1885.
• BaringBankers and proconsuls, the sixth great power of Europe.
• NewmanThe new man, the village byname that named a Cardinal.
• HartAt the sign of the hart.
• SuttonThe south farmstead.
• LucasFrom Luke the Evangelist, a church name made surname.
• PetersSon of Peter, the rock-name made patronymic.

Historic ties to London

Families with historic but not core ground here.

• Robinson
• Thompson
• Hall
• Ward
• Green
• White
• Mason
• Turner
• Cook
• Adams
• James
• Bailey
• Thatcher
• Shakespeare
• Newton
• Phillips
• Fisher
• Cox
• Richardson
• Webb
• Payne
• Holmes
• West
• Long
• Howard
• Davis
• Jackson
• Martin
• Lee
• Brooks
• Bennett
• Russell
• Harris
• Baker
• Miller
• Stevens
• Jenkins
• Mills
• Ford
• Stone
• Fox
• Saunders
• Reed
• Coleman
• Hopkins
• Simpson
• Marshall
• Harvey
• Gibson
• Spencer
• Matthews
• Lane
• Hunt
• Palmer
• Hayes
• Day
• Webster
• Cole
• Weston
• Curtis
• Lawrence
• Bates
• Haynes
• Rogers
• Ellis
• Reynolds
• Gray
• Cromwell
• Cecil
• Cavendish
• Booth
• Hudson
• Wells
• Tice
• Vance
• Burnham
• Sharp

Champions made here

Famous bearers whose lives or work root in London.

• Norman FosterThe Reddish council-flat boy who built the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, glazed the Reichstag, and made the steel-and-glass corporate atrium the dominant late-twentieth-century building type.
• E. M. ForsterThe Edwardian novelist whose six books defined the English liberal humanist imagination and gave the language the phrase Only connect.
• Graham ChapmanThe Leicester doctor who joined Monty Python instead of medicine, played King Arthur and Brian, and was the first British television figure to come out publicly as gay.
• H. V. MortonThe newspaperman who wrote In Search of England in 1927, sold a million copies of it, and built the inter-war popular travel-writing tradition.
• Sir Henry ColeThe Bath-born civil servant who reformed the Public Record Office, designed the first commercial Christmas card in 1843, organised the Great Exhibition of 1851 with Prince Albert, and built the South Kensington museum quarter around the profits.
• Sir Robert HolmesThe Cork-born Cavalier who became Charles II's instrument at sea, won fame as one of the Royal Navy's most daring commanders, and governed the Isle of Wight for the last twenty years of his life.
• John WebsterThe Smithfield coach-maker's son who wrote The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, the two greatest revenge tragedies of the Jacobean stage after Shakespeare.
• Henry Walter BatesThe Leicester hosier's apprentice who spent eleven years collecting beetles on the upper Amazon, came home with fourteen thousand species new to science, and described in 1862 the mimicry mechanism that gave Darwinian evolution its first independent field-evidence.
• Glenda JacksonThe Birkenhead bricklayer's daughter who won two Academy Awards in three years, served twenty-three years as a Labour MP, and came back to play King Lear at seventy-nine.
• Matthew ParkerThe Norwich worsted-finisher's son who became Elizabeth I's first Archbishop of Canterbury, drafted the Thirty-Nine Articles that became the doctrinal spine of the Church of England, and saved the Anglo-Saxon manuscript inheritance by collecting it.
• Sir George PorterThe South Yorkshire railway-clerk's son who developed flash photolysis at Cambridge in the late 1940s, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for it in 1967, ran the Royal Institution for nineteen years, and served as President of the Royal Society at the close of the twentieth century.
• William MarshalThe landless knight who became the most celebrated soldier of his century, served five English kings, witnessed Magna Carta, and as Regent for the boy Henry III won the war that saved the English crown.
• Ford Madox FordThe grandson of the painter Ford Madox Brown who founded the English Review, discovered D. H. Lawrence, collaborated with Joseph Conrad, and wrote The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy, two of the foundational modernist English novels.
• Daniel Day-LewisThe Poet Laureate's son who won three Academy Awards for Best Actor, the only person to have done so, and retired from the screen at the height of his career.
• Sir Robin DayThe Oxford Union president who became one of ITN's first newsreaders in 1955, chaired Question Time for its first decade, and built the modern British televised political interview.
• Alfred MarshallThe Bermondsey bank cashier's son who wrote Principles of Economics in 1890, founded the Cambridge economics tripos, and turned political economy into the technical discipline it has been since.
• Johnny HaynesThe Edmonton schoolboy who played 658 games for Fulham in one shirt over eighteen seasons, captained England, and became the first British footballer paid a hundred pounds a week.
• Sir William CurtisThe Wapping ship's-biscuit baker who fed the Royal Navy through the Napoleonic Wars, sat as a City of London MP for nearly thirty years, served as Lord Mayor, and put George IV into a kilt at Holyrood in 1822.
• Samuel PalmerThe south-London bookseller's son who met William Blake at nineteen, gathered a circle of disciples called the Ancients, and produced at Shoreham the visionary landscapes that became the foundation of English visionary art.
• Catherine HayesThe Limerick seamstress's daughter who was heard singing on a balcony at nineteen, trained in Paris and Milan, sang at La Scala by twenty-six, and became the first Irish-born soprano to tour the world.
• George Bernard ShawThe Dublin clerk's son who left Ireland at twenty, wrote sixty plays, co-founded the London School of Economics, and won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature.
• James MasonThe Huddersfield wool merchant's son who gave up architecture for the stage, became the highest-paid actor in British cinema, and earned three Best Actor Oscar nominations across a Hollywood career.
• Simon WestonThe Caerphilly council-estate boy who joined the Welsh Guards at sixteen, survived the Sir Galahad bombing at Bluff Cove in 1982, and built four decades as the public face of British veterans' welfare.
• Sir John MillsThe Norfolk schoolmaster's son who came through the chorus line to make In Which We Serve with Coward and Great Expectations with Lean, won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Ryan's Daughter, and ran for sixty-five years as the everyman of British screen acting.
• Alan BennettThe Leeds butcher's son whose Beyond the Fringe broke open the post-war British comedy stage, and who went on to write the Talking Heads television monologues and the prizewinning The History Boys across a sixty-year working life.
• Sir William WaltonThe Oldham choirmaster's son who came up through Christ Church Cathedral Choir to write Façade at twenty, the oratorio Belshazzar's Feast, two coronation marches, and the Henry V score that founded English film music.
• David ColemanThe Alderley Edge railway-clerk's son who anchored the BBC's Grandstand for twenty years, presented every Olympic Games on British television from Rome 1960 to Sydney 2000, and chaired A Question of Sport.
• Fred PerryThe Stockport son of a Labour MP who took the World Table Tennis title in 1929, won three Wimbledon singles championships from 1934 to 1936, and founded the laurel-wreath polo-shirt brand that wears his name.
• Julian BarnesThe Leicester French-teacher's son who worked through literary journalism and the OED, wrote Flaubert's Parrot, and won the 2011 Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending.
• Sir Jonathan MillerThe St John's Wood psychiatrist's son who qualified as a doctor, walked into Beyond the Fringe at twenty-six, and directed Shakespeare and Mozart across the British theatre and opera houses for forty years.
• Roy JenkinsThe Welsh miner's son who served as Home Secretary and Chancellor, drove through the foundational social reforms of the late 1960s, ran the European Commission, co-founded the SDP, and wrote the standard biographies of Gladstone and Churchill.
• Dame Rebecca WestThe Streatham journalist's daughter who wrote under an Ibsen pen-name from twenty, produced Black Lamb and Grey Falcon on the eve of the Second World War, and reported the Nuremberg trials for the New Yorker.
• Samuel RichardsonThe Derbyshire joiner's son who came to London as a printer's apprentice, ran his own press off Fleet Street, and in his fifties wrote Pamela and Clarissa, the foundational works of the modern English psychological novel.
• Herbert MorrisonThe Brixton police-constable's son who left school at fourteen, built and led the London County Council for Labour, served as Home Secretary in the Churchill wartime coalition and Deputy Prime Minister to Attlee, and was the architect of the 1951 Festival of Britain.
• Sir Richard RogersThe Florence-born Anglo-Italian architect who designed the Pompidou Centre with Renzo Piano, the Lloyd's of London building and the Millennium Dome, won the Pritzker Prize, and built the public-and-civic buildings of late-twentieth-century European cities.
• Dame Julie AndrewsThe Walton-on-Thames child star with a four-octave range who created Eliza in the original My Fair Lady on Broadway, won the 1965 Best Actress Academy Award for Mary Poppins, and starred in The Sound of Music, one of the most successful films in the history of cinema.
• Dame Laura KnightThe Long Eaton lace-designer's daughter who won an art scholarship at thirteen, painted alongside the Newlyn and Lamorna colonies, became the first woman elected a full Royal Academician in 1936, and served as a war artist at the Nuremberg trial.
• Dame Helen GardnerThe Finchley schoolmaster's daughter who took a starred First at St Hilda's Oxford in 1929, became the Merton Professor of English Literature, edited the definitive editions of Donne, and produced the New Oxford Book of English Verse that set post-war academic poetic taste.
• William Webb EllisThe Salford soldier's son and Rugby School foundation scholar who, in the foundation story of the modern game, picked up the ball and ran with it in 1823, becoming the namesake of running-with-the-ball football and the figure whose name is on the Rugby World Cup trophy.
• Ralph AllenThe St Blazey innkeeper's son who reformed the British cross-post system, made the General Post Office financially viable, bought the Combe Down quarries and built Prior Park from his own stone, and was the Squire Allworthy of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.
• Dame Siân PhillipsThe Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen miner's daughter whose Welsh was her first language, took RADA at seventeen, played Livia in the BBC's I, Claudius as a landmark of British classical television, and ran a sixty-five-year English-language and Welsh-language acting career.
• Jess PhillipsThe Birmingham social-worker's daughter who ran Black Country Women's Aid through the post-austerity funding crisis, won the Labour seat of Birmingham Yardley in 2015, became Shadow Minister for Domestic Violence and Safeguarding, and is the Home Office Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls.
• Naomi LongThe Belfast Methodist civil-engineer's daughter who became Lord Mayor of Belfast at thirty-eight, took East Belfast at Westminster in 2010, became the first woman to lead a major Northern Irish party in 2016, and has served as Northern Ireland Minister of Justice through the Stormont restoration of 2024.
• Herbert ChapmanThe Yorkshire mining engineer who invented the modern football manager, built title-winning dynasties at Huddersfield and Arsenal, and died in harness with the game remade in his image.
• Henry VThe warrior-king born at Monmouth who, outnumbered and hungry in the Picardy mud at Agincourt, broke the chivalry of France in an afternoon and made himself heir to its throne.
• Isaac NewtonThe Lincolnshire farmer's son whose plague-year notebooks at Woolsthorpe became the calculus, the theory of colour and the law of universal gravitation, and whose Principia of 1687 set the frame of modern science.
• Henry CavendishThe reclusive grandson of two dukes who isolated hydrogen in 1766, proved water to be a compound, and in his Clapham garden weighed the Earth.
• William HarveyThe Kentish yeoman's son who trained at Padua, served as physician to two Stuart kings, and in 1628 published the small Latin book that proved the blood moves in a closed circle round the body.
• Frederick Gowland HopkinsThe Sussex chemist who proved that diet alone was not enough, that the body needs minute accessory substances to live, and who in 1929 took the Nobel Prize for the work that gave the world the vitamins.
• Robert BrownThe Montrose minister's son who sailed as naturalist on the Investigator to chart the coasts of Australia, named the cell nucleus, and observed the random motion of pollen grains in water that today bears his name.
• Robert Watson-WattThe Brechin engineer descended in the male line from James Watt, who in February 1935 tracked an RAF bomber by reflected radio waves over Daventry, and went on to build the Chain Home radar that won the Battle of Britain.
• Donald DaviesThe Treorchy-born physicist who in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory invented packet switching, the message-chopping principle on which every packet of internet traffic in the world has travelled ever since.
• John LewisThe Shepton Mallet draper's apprentice who opened a single Oxford Street shop in 1864 and whose son turned the firm into the John Lewis Partnership, owned in trust by every person who works in it.
• Sir Francis BaringThe Exeter cloth-merchant's son who in 1762 founded the first merchant bank in Britain, and built it into the institution the French ambassador in 1818 named as the sixth great power of Europe.
• Nathan Mayer RothschildThe Frankfurt textile-broker's third son who arrived in Manchester at twenty-one and built in London the bank that financed the British defeat of Napoleon and the long peace that followed it.
• Sir Arthur Conan DoyleThe Edinburgh-born Irish-Catholic ship's surgeon whose Sherlock Holmes stories set the template for every detective in the English-language popular imagination and made the Holmes name the single most-portrayed character in screen history.
• William ShakespeareThe Stratford glover's son who wrote thirty-nine plays and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets for the Lord Chamberlain's company at the Globe and fixed the English language at its working maximum.
• Margaret ThatcherThe Grantham grocer's daughter who in May 1979 became the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, served three full terms, recovered the Falkland Islands by force of arms in 1982, and stood with Ronald Reagan as one of the two western political leaders who shaped the end of the Cold War.
• Charles DickensThe Portsmouth-born naval clerk's son whose fifteen novels, written in monthly serial parts from the Pickwick Papers of 1836 to the Mystery of Edwin Drood of 1870, made the social conscience of the English-speaking world.
• Sir David AttenboroughThe Leicester-raised natural-history broadcaster whose Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984), Trials of Life (1990), Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006) defined the modern television documentary and brought the natural world to the largest audience any broadcaster has assembled in the history of the medium.
• J. M. W. TurnerThe Covent Garden barber's son who at fifteen exhibited his first watercolour at the Royal Academy and through the next sixty years invented the modern landscape painting of light, weather and the sea.
• Samuel JohnsonThe Lichfield bookseller's son whose Dictionary of the English Language (1755) defined the modern English vocabulary, whose Lives of the Poets (1779 to 1781) founded English-language literary biography, and whose nine-year conversation with James Boswell produced the greatest biography in the English language.
• Sir Joshua ReynoldsThe Plympton schoolmaster's son who in December 1768 became the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts and through the next twenty-three years gave the fifteen Discourses on Art that founded the institutional vocabulary of British academic painting.
• Sir Edward ElgarThe Worcestershire piano-tuner's son whose Enigma Variations of 1899 and Dream of Gerontius of 1900 returned the English musical tradition to the front rank of European composition and whose Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 of 1901 became, with the words of Land of Hope and Glory, the central ceremonial music of the British state.
• Sir Gilbert Elliot, 1st Earl of MintoThe Edinburgh-born Borders Whig who as Viceroy of Corsica (1794 to 1796) governed the only British constitutional kingdom in the Mediterranean, and as Governor-General of India (1807 to 1813) opened the British relationship with the Punjab and won the Mauritius and Java campaigns.
• Deborah KerrThe Helensburgh-raised Glasgow-born actress whose performances in From Here to Eternity (1953), The King and I (1956), Tea and Sympathy (1956), An Affair to Remember (1957) and The Sundowners (1960) made her one of the central film actresses of the post-war Hollywood studio system, with six Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in nine years.
• Aneurin BevanThe Tredegar collier's son who left the colliery face at thirteen and on the fifth of July 1948 brought into being the National Health Service, the largest single act of social provision in British history.
• Elizabeth BowenThe Dublin-born Anglo-Irish novelist of The Last September (1929), The Death of the Heart (1938), The Heat of the Day (1949) and the great London Blitz short stories, who through the central thirty years of her career sat at the intersection of the Bloomsbury and Anglo-Irish literary worlds.
• George HerbertThe Montgomery-born metaphysical poet of the seventeenth-century English religious tradition whose collection The Temple, prepared on his death-bed at Bemerton in 1633 and posthumously published the same year, ran through thirteen editions in fifty years and stands at the centre of the English-language devotional lyric tradition.
• Dylan ThomasThe Swansea-born Welsh poet whose Deaths and Entrances (1946) returned a fresh English-language lyric to the post-war reader, whose radio drama Under Milk Wood (broadcast 1954) is one of the central works of the BBC Third Programme, and whose 1951 villanelle Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night is on every modern anthology of twentieth-century English verse.
• Roger WilliamsThe London-born Welsh-extraction Cambridge cleric who in February 1636 founded Providence Plantations on the principle of complete separation of church and state, the foundational charter of the modern principle of religious liberty in the United States Constitution.
• Sir Samuel BakerThe Worcester sugar-merchant's son whose 1864 march from Khartoum into the Equatoria highlands brought him to the cliff above the lake he named Lake Albert in honour of Prince Albert, the second of the two source-lakes of the Nile and the central confirmation of John Hanning Speke's 1858 identification of the Nile's headwaters at Lake Victoria.
• Josephine ButlerThe Northumberland-born Liverpool clergyman's wife who led the seventeen-year national campaign that secured the 1886 repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, and through that campaign founded the modern English-language women's-rights movement against state-licensed prostitution.
• Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of ShaftesburyThe Dorsetshire-born Tory peer whose parliamentary career across sixty years secured the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British Empire, the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act ending child and female employment underground, the 1847 Ten Hours Act regulating the textile mills, and a chain of further humanitarian statutes that constitute the foundational corpus of Victorian factory and social legislation.
• Sir Rowland HillThe Kidderminster schoolmaster whose 1837 pamphlet Post Office Reform proposed the uniform penny postage rate paid by the sender by means of a prepaid adhesive label, the founding architecture of the modern postal system and the most-imitated single English administrative innovation of the nineteenth century.
• Sir Allen LaneThe Bristol-born junior publisher whose 1935 founding of Penguin Books at sixpence the volume produced the paperback revolution that took the great works of English-language fiction and non-fiction out of the hardback club-library trade and onto the railway-bookstall rack of every reader in the country.
• Sir George MartinThe Holloway carpenter's son who at twenty-four became Head of EMI's Parlophone Records, in 1962 signed and produced the Beatles, and across the next eight years engineered the sound of Please Please Me, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album, Abbey Road and Let It Be.
• John RuskinThe Bloomsbury-born sherry-merchant's son whose five-volume Modern Painters (1843 to 1860) made the critical reputation of J. M. W. Turner, whose Stones of Venice (1851 to 1853) established the critical vocabulary of Gothic architecture, and whose Unto This Last (1862) was the most-cited single text on the early British Labour movement.
• Bertrand RussellThe Trellech-born mathematician-philosopher whose three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910 to 1913, co-authored with A. N. Whitehead) set the foundations of mathematical logic on the modern footing, whose A History of Western Philosophy (1945) is the most-read English-language history of philosophy of the twentieth century, and whose 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature honoured the work as the central intellectual platform of the post-war English-speaking world.
• Dame Cicely SaundersThe Barnet-born nurse, almoner and physician whose July 1967 founding of St Christopher's Hospice at Sydenham, south London, instituted the modern hospice movement, the foundational institution of palliative care worldwide.
• Count RumfordThe Massachusetts-born American Loyalist who as scientific adviser and Minister of War to the Elector of Bavaria reformed the Bavarian Army and the Munich poor-relief system, made the foundational mechanical-equivalent-of-heat observation in his 1798 cannon-boring experiments at the Munich Arsenal, and on his return to England founded the Royal Institution at Albemarle Street in 1799.
• William MorrisThe Walthamstow-born Arts and Crafts founder whose firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (founded 1861) returned hand-craft principles to mid-Victorian English design, whose epic verse and Icelandic-saga translations occupy the long Earthly Paradise (1868 to 1870), and whose socialist platform-and-pamphlet work of the 1880s made him the central English-language founder of the modern democratic-socialist tradition.
• Queen Elizabeth IIThe queen whose seventy years and two hundred and fourteen days on the throne, the longest reign of any British monarch, bracketed the entire post-war era and anchored the constitutional continuity of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth through the largest social, economic and political transformations since the seventeenth century.
• King George IIIThe third Hanoverian monarch whose sixty-year reign from 1760 to 1820, the longest of any king in British history before the twentieth century, spanned the American Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Acts of Union with Ireland, and the foundational decades of the Industrial Revolution.
• Hugh Lupus GrosvenorThe 3rd Marquess of Westminster who in February 1874 was created 1st Duke of Westminster by Disraeli, the last person outside the immediate British royal family to be elevated to a non-royal dukedom, and who across his fifty-five-year tenure of the family estate transformed the Mayfair and Belgravia inheritance into the most valuable urban property holding in the world.
• Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron ErskineThe Edinburgh-born advocate whose defences of Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and the leaders of the London Corresponding Society at the Treason Trials of 1794 secured the modern English law of seditious libel, and whose 1806 to 1807 tenure as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain crowned the legal career of the foremost defender of political and religious liberty of his age.
• Herbert HowellsThe Lydney-born composer whose 1938 Hymnus Paradisi, written in private grief over the death of his nine-year-old son and not performed publicly until 1950, stands at the centre of the twentieth-century English-language choral tradition, and whose long teaching career at the Royal College of Music shaped two generations of British composers.
• Richard HarrisThe Limerick-born actor whose performances in This Sporting Life (1963), Camelot (1967), The Field (1990) and Unforgiven (1992) brought him two Academy Award nominations for Best Actor, whose 1968 recording of MacArthur Park sold five million copies as a #2 Billboard single, and whose late-career role as Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films introduced him to a third global audience.
• Sir Henry WoodThe Oxford Street-born conductor whose 1895 inauguration of the Promenade Concerts at the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, founded the longest-running annual classical music festival in the world, conducted continuously since (today as the BBC Proms, the largest classical music festival on earth).
• Thomas CromwellThe Putney blacksmith's son whose nine years as Chief Minister to Henry VIII reshaped the constitutional architecture of the English state, carried the Royal Supremacy through the Reformation Parliament, dissolved the monasteries, and established the modern English-language Bible in every parish church in the country.
• Sir Andy MurrayThe Dunblane-raised Scottish tennis player whose three Grand Slam singles titles (US Open 2012, Wimbledon 2013, Wimbledon 2016), two Olympic singles gold medals (London 2012, Rio 2016) and 2015 Davis Cup victory made him the first British male singles Grand Slam champion since Fred Perry in 1936 and the first British Davis Cup-winning singles player since Bunny Austin in 1933.
• Sir Anthony HopkinsThe Port Talbot-born Welsh actor whose performance as Dr Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) won the Academy Award for Best Actor on twenty-four minutes and fifty-two seconds of screen-time, and whose 2020 performance in Florian Zeller's The Father took the second Best Actor Oscar at eighty-three, making him the oldest winner of the Best Actor award in Academy history.
• Sir Tim Berners-LeeThe London-born CERN software engineer whose March 1989 proposal Information Management at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research at Geneva and his subsequent invention of HTML, HTTP and the URL system in 1990 and 1991 founded the World Wide Web, the universal hypertext system on which the modern information economy of the world is built.
• Lord John RussellThe Whig statesman whose drafting and parliamentary management of the Reform Act of 1832, repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, framing of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, and two Prime Ministerships (1846 to 1852 and 1865 to 1866) made him the central single architect of the long Whig-Liberal constitutional reform programme of the mid-nineteenth-century British state.
• Sir Arthur SullivanThe Lambeth bandmaster's son whose twenty-two-year partnership with the librettist W. S. Gilbert at the Savoy Theatre from 1875 to 1896 produced the fourteen Savoy Operas (HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, The Mikado, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Gondoliers) that founded the modern English-language musical theatre tradition.
• Herbert SpencerThe Derby Dissenting schoolmaster's son whose nine-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860 to 1896) built the foundational evolutionary social theory of the Victorian century, whose 1864 Principles of Biology coined the phrase survival of the fittest, and who at his death in 1903 was the most-translated single philosopher in the English-speaking world.
• Sir Peter HallThe Bury St Edmunds station-master's son whose 1960 founding of the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon and his fifteen-year directorship of the National Theatre from 1973 to 1988 made the two foundational institutional structures of the modern English-language classical theatre.
• Sir Henry CooperThe Lambeth-born English heavyweight boxer whose left hook (Enry's 'Ammer) knocked down the world heavyweight title-holder Cassius Clay in the fourth round at Wembley on the eighteenth of June 1963, who held the British, Empire and European heavyweight titles continuously through the 1960s, and who at his retirement in 1971 was the most-decorated British boxer of the post-war era.

Stories told here

Legends set in London, from any family that carries them.

• Baird's first television demonstration at Frith Street1926
  On the Clan Baird page
• Parry sets Blake's Jerusalem to music1916
  On the Parry page
• Fred Perry wins Wimbledon1934
  On the Perry page
• Norman Foster's Reichstag dome opens to the Bundestag1999
  On the Foster page
• The Matthews FA Cup Final1953
  On the Matthews page
• Henry V at Agincourt1415
  On the House of Plantagenet page
• The accession of George I at Greenwich1714
  On the House of Hanover page
• The Coronation of Elizabeth II1953
  On the House of Windsor page
• Burghley and the Babington Plot1586
  On the Cecil page
• Cavendish weighs the Earth1798
  On the Cavendish page
• Rothschild and the Waterloo news at New Court1815
  On the Rothschild page
• William Booth and the Mile End Mission1865
  On the Booth page