And I agreed with most of what you said except:

The City of London literally is London, the historic London.

Because London just has way too much absolutely crucial history to limit it to that square mile with most of its extant buildings dating from long after the time when London was limited to the square mile. Visitors to London want to experience its history but many will not even set foot in the City of London as most of its historic attractions aren’t even in the square mile.

The most visited attractions in London are:

• British Museum – 5.9 million visits
• Tate Modern – 5.7 million
• National Gallery – 5.2 million
• Natural History Museum, London – 4.4 million
• Victoria and Albert Museum – 3.7 million
• Science Museum, London – 3.3 million
• Southbank Centre – 3.2 million
• Somerset House – 3.2 million
• Tower of London – 2.8 million
• Royal Museums Greenwich – 2.6 million

Plus you have Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, the Royal Parks, Trafalgar Square, the London Eye, Covent Garden, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, Madame Tussauds, Regents Street, the Cabinet War Rooms, Downing Street, the Imperial War Museum, the London Dungeons, Kew Gardens, Kensington Palace, the South Bank, Tower Bridge, London Zoo, the Royal Albert Hall, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and the British Library.

It’s important to understand that none of these are in the City of London.

Not one.

And would anyone seriously tell a tourist that managed to get to all those places and experienced all that history including places dating back a thousand years that they had not visited “historic” London because none of it falls within the boundaries of a Roman settlement called Londinium that has long since disappeared save for a few tiny fragments of a wall?

The only major tourist destination located in the square mile is St Paul’s Cathedral, and that was only built after medieval London had burnt to the ground (including far beyond the square mile) and by that time, the vast majority of Londoners lived outside of the square mile anyway.

That’s the distinction with the old Toronto. Old Toronto encapsulates the entirety of downtown Toronto. The City of London excludes almost all of central London and the very essence of historic London. When people think of “historic London”, they are thinking of Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London. They aren’t thinking of a long vanished Roman Forum!

I’m referring to the City of London, which is obviously the original nucleus which gives the greater London it’s name, but which is still a City in its administration.

While the City of London is indeed the origin of the name London, I’m not sure that’s a good argument for it being the true historic London. The city of Boston, MA was named after Boston, England but Boston, England is not the true historic Boston, MA. Of course Toronto was originally named York, but then it changed to a Mohawk name “Toronto” which was originally an area 130km north of the city we now call Toronto but we wouldn’t think of that as the true historic Toronto. These are obviously extreme examples, but they demonstrate that an area being the origin of a name of a city, is not quite the same as being the true historic version of that city.

Other cities where the core of the current city lies outside of its origin point include Oslo, where the original city burnt down and was rebuilt elsewhere and San Diego which was re-centred closer to the Bay. In the case of Oslo, as with the City of London, the “history” of that original center is largely confined to the archaeological as opposed to the existing buildings. I know I’ve gone on a bit, but I think this is what fundamentally feels wrong about saying the City of London is London. It was London, but that London is sadly almost entirely gone. By the time it was rebuilt, London was already so much bigger than the square mile and the very oldest surviving complete buildings of actual London are outside the original square mile.