Go for your Business English. Новосельцева Н.Н - 17 стр.

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6
London
When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life: for there is in London all
that life can afford, wrote Samuel Johnson in 1777. He would recognize many of the
great sights on both sides of the Thames, which winds its way downstream from
Windsor and Hampton Court, past Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, the
Tower, and on down to Greenwich and the sea.
When H.G. Wells wrote in 1911 that “London is the most interesting beautiful
and wonderful city in the world to me”, horse drawn carriages and Edwardian
splendour were on their way out.
The 20
th
century was about to enforce dramatic changes on the London
skyline – skyscrapers in the City, the Telecom Tower, an arts center on the South
Bank and arising now, Docklands, the business centre for the 21
st
century.
Yet London, the world’s capital, has kept its heart. Johnson would still be able
to drink coffee in Covent Garden, or meander through the City’s narrow streets to
churches and livery companies with echoes of Medieval days. H.G. Wells might,
today, listen to debates in the House of Parliament, attend a concert in the Albert
Hall or listen to a military band in a royal park. Today London is a sprawling,
cosmopolitan metropolis, about 1600 square km, an exciting world which many
visitors from abroad see first from the sky, surprised that the ribbon-like Thames is
so curvaceous and a score of bridges so decorative. Down there, seven million
people are at home, not in anonymous suburbs but in the Cities of London and
Westminster and in districts which have remnants of their countrified past, in
Marylebone and Kensington, Hampstead and Highgate with their own high streets
and historic monuments remembering famous men and women who built a London
which each generation discovers anew. Documented history goes back to the time
when Westminster was still a marsh. The Romans had inhabited the land which
became the City, building a bridge across the Thames by AD60 and creating a
celebrated centre of commerce filled with traders. Westminster, established as a
royal palace shortly before the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066, gradually
grew in importance as it became the seat of government, beside the Thames and next
door to Westminster Abbey a couple of minutes from the City. Big Ben, the voice of
London, has been telling the time to the second since 1859. Construction of the 96 m
clock tower began in the year Queen Victoria came to the throne, 1837, as part of the
reconstruction of the Houses of Parliament following the devastating fire of 1834.
Clock designer, Sir Edmund Grimthorpe, the architect and clockmaker all died
before the 13 ½ ton bell was mounted behind the four clock faces, which each
measure 7 m in diameter.
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