scubish.com: Scuba diving London - Canada

London is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor with a metropolitan area population of 457,720; the city proper had a population of 352,395 in the 2006 Canadian census.

London is the seat of Middlesex County, at the forks of the non-navigable Thames River, halfway between Toronto and Detroit, Michigan. London and the surrounding area (roughly, the territory between Kitchener-Waterloo and Windsor) is collectively known as Southwestern Ontario. The City of London is a single-tier municipality, politically separate from Middlesex County though it remains the official county seat.

London was first settled by Europeans in 1826 and was incorporated as a city on January 1, 1855. Since then, London has grown into the largest Southwestern Ontario municipality and the city has developed a strong focus towards education, health care, tourism, manufacturing, economic leadership and prosperity.

History

Prior to European contact in the 18th century, the present site of London was occupied by several Neutral and Odawa/Ojibwa villages; the village at the forks of Askunessippi, now called the Thames River, was called Kotequogong by the latter two groups. Archaeological investigations in the region indicate that aboriginal people have resided in the area for at least the past 10,000 years.

The current location of London was selected to be the site of the future capital of Upper Canada in 1793 by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe. It was Simcoe who named the settlement after London, England and also renamed the river, however, his choice was initially rejected by Guy Carleton, (Governor Dorchester), who made the comment that "access to London would be limited to hot-air balloons".

In 1814, there was a skirmish during the War of 1812 in what is now southwest London at Reservoir Hill, formerly Hungerford Hill.

The village itself was not founded until 1826 and never became the capital envisioned by Simcoe. It was part of the Talbot Settlement, overseen by Colonel Thomas Talbot, who oversaw the surveying of the land and built the first government buildings for the administration of the Western Ontario region. With the rest of Southwestern Ontario which was part of this settlement, it benefited from Talbot's provisions for building and maintaining roads and for assignment of priority for access to main roads to productive land (rather than to Crown and clergy reserves, which received preference in the rest of Ontario).

In 1832, the new settlement suffered an outbreak of cholera. London remained a centre of strong Tory support during the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, with a large British garrison stationed there, although there was a brief rebellion led by Dr. Charles Duncombe, who was forced to flee to the U.S.

On April 13, 1845, a large fire destroyed much of London, which was at the time filled with mostly wooden buildings. One of the first casualties of the fire was the town's only fire engine. In the 1860s, sulphur hot springs were discovered at the forks of the Thames River while industrialists were drilling for oil. The springs became a popular...