London in 1599–1600: A Portrait of the Elizabethan Capital

Population ~200,000—one of Europe’s largest. Two cores:

• City of London (square mile): commercial heart, guilds, merchants, St. Paul’s (old), Royal Exchange.
• Westminster: royal court (Whitehall), Parliament, aristocratic mansions.

Daily life: crowded, noisy, smelly streets; Thames as highway; bear-baiting, playhouses (Globe built 1599), taverns. Shakespeare’s company performing; Marlowe recently dead; East India Company chartered 1600. Plague outbreaks recurrent. No sanitation, high mortality. Yet a magnet for ambition, print, theater, and global trade dawning.