As late as August 2002 a report commissioned by the Greater London Authority was called: A City of Villages: promoting a sustainable future for London's suburbs'. How can it be that in a globalized world of flows rather than spaces, some people in a truly global city can seemingly cling to the idea that they are inhabitants of a village' rather than of a city? Has local identity been retained into postmodernism? This article will focus on the period 1780-1914, for it was in this period that villages like Fulham and Hackney became suburbs, and then became part of the inner-city. The question is how much of the village identity remained? More than other great world cities, London did develop organically out of different localities, rather than different localities growing out of the city, but it ultimately seems rather twee to refer to Kensington as a village, and slightly pathetic when Peter Ackroyd, in his popular biography of London, claims the Islington will always be Islington'-the Islington of today is simply not the Islington of 1780.

As late as 1920 the inhabitants of Poplar decided to blockade the roads and declare independence. George Lansbury, who briefly became leader of the Labour Party used this Poplarism' or localism' to give his career a kick-start. There was an inevitable lag between the physical and economic integration of London, and this being mirrored in people's temporality.

A century earlier another left-wing politician on the make, Sir Francis Place, complained to William Cobbett that:
"London differs very widely from Manchester, and, indeed from every other place on the face of the earth. It has no local or particular interest as a town, not even as politics. Its several boroughs in this respect are like so many very populous places at a distance from one another, and the inhabitants of any one of them know nothing, or next to nothing, of the proceedings in any other, and not much indeed of their own"

Even when under the unifying influence of radical politics, therefore, London was still socially and intellectually diverse. This excerpt becomes more complex, however, as it can also be seen as affirmation of an overarching London identity. Place was at least in part telling his northern colleague to muck off. Also been pointed out that Place, along with William Lovett, lacked any knowledge of politics outside of London. When historians look back at the chartist movement, they often point to regional divergences for its failures.

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