People have lived in the London area for more than 5,000 years, but instead of a city, there used to be forests and marshes.

The legend of how London began

Legend says that London was founded not by the Romans of the 1st century AD, but in a far more ancient time by Brutus the Trojan, around 1070 BC, about 1000 years before the Roman invasion.

Brutus was the great-grandson of Aeneas, a Trojan prince who was one of the few survivors after the Greeks burnt Troy to the ground.

Read the story how the Greeks made a big wooden horse and filled it with soldiers

Following the destruction of the city of Troy, the inhabitants set off to find new lands. According to a 12th-century monk named Geoffrey of Monmouth, when Brutus lands in Britian it's inhabited by a race of giants led by Gog and Magog. After wrestling them into submission, Brutus chains them to the doors of his palace, he builds on the site where the Guildhall is today.

Drawings of the old wooden statues of Gog and Magog

Wooden statues of Gog and Magog stood guard outside the entrance of the Guidhall until they were destroyed in an air raid in 1940. Today, Gog and Magog are considered as the traditional guardians of the City of London, and images of the two have been carried in the Lord Mayor’s Show since the reign of Henry V (1412-1422).

Effigies of Gog and Magog carried at the 2007 Lord Mayors Show

 

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