"James Farrar" wrote in message
...
Charles Ellson wrote:
On Tuesday, in article
"Matthew Malthouse" wrote:
snip
The City of Wesminster is the seat of parliament, monarch and courts
since Henry IV. In every meanigful sense it's the capital of England.
The City of London is just more famous.
Hosting a parliament does not make somewhere a capital city, as will be
found in a number of countries (including the UK). Westminster is only
one place which has a royal palace. Nil points.
m-w.com, capital [sense 2] 3 b: being the seat of government
Nil points for you, I'm afraid.
Precisely. If being the centre for government, law and finance does not make
a city its country's capital, what does? Charles, are you saying that London
is England's financial capital and Westminster its governemnt and legal
capital?
I think when people in common parlance talk about London being the capital
of England (and maybe of GB and the UK), they mean the whole of London (how
ever you define "the whole"!), rather than simply the City of London (just
the financial centre and not the government and legal centre). I tend to
think of the City of Westminster and the City of London as being merely
districts of a nebulous place called "London" which for historical reasons
has been divided into two very small adjacent cities which don't include
most of central "London". As a matter of interest, do postcode boundaries
follow the boundary between the Cities of Westminster and London?
However a capital city doesn't have to be the country's largest city - think
of Scotland (Edinburgh is smaller than Glasgow), Australia (Canberra is
titchy compared with Sydney, Melbourne etc) or the old West Germany (Bonn
was titchy compared with Hamburg, Munich etc).