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|title=London in the 18th century

|author=Jerry White

|publisher=Vintage

|date=March 2013

|summary=The last in a trilogy of histories of London surveying the last three hundred years.

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White has already written accounts of London in the 19th and 20th centuries, and this is the last in a planned trilogy. In 1700, according to an unnamed contemporary source, it was one of the ‘most Spacious, Populous, Rich, Beautiful, Renowned and Noble Citys that we know of at this day in the World’. It was also the largest city in Europe. By the end of the century, it would double in extent and population, and become the largest in the universe. Carl Phillipp Moritz, a visitor from Germany in 1782, could climb St Paul's Cathedral and comment with amazement that he found it impossible to ascertain where London began or ended, ‘or where the circumjacent villages began; far as the eye could reach, it seemed to be all one continued chain’.