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I don't know for London specifically, but for most medium/smaller towns, in Norway and other European countries, there was one dominating church, and the church tower was used to locate the town.
At least in Norway, if the church was located by itself, outside the village on a hilltop to be seen, the coordinates of the railroad station, usually right in the village center, was used as the coordinates of the village.
I lived for a year in a Midwestern village with a population of 738, but it had four churches. You couldn't pick one of those! I believe that common practice on the prairie was to use the City Hall as a reference.
For London: You should certainly be aware (you probably are!) that 'The City of London' is only a small part of 'greater London'. Most of what we think of as 'the London area' is, formally speaking, a crowd of other cities that has merged with each other and The City of London.
My guess is that the tower of St. Paul's Cathedral is the one defining the location of London. It is essential to Londoners, and it is right in the middle of the 'Greater London' area.
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thanks for the great info!![Rose | [Rose]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
diligent hands rule....
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agree
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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Historically, Charing Cross was the "centre" of London, to where all distances from other destinations were measured.
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"The centre of London is often given as the Charles I statue south of Trafalgar Square."
Edit: Here in Phoenix, the (0,0) point is the intersection of Central and Washington.
modified 14-Nov-23 15:49pm.
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I believe the city centre is the 'headquarters' of the city. This is also where distances (between cities) are reckoned from.
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Are you asking how it could be done or how it is done?
It could be defined as the coordinates of the center of gravity of the polygon(s) representing the city boundaries. It is however done in the manner similar to the one described by trønderen, i.e picking an arbitrary place of a certain dubious relevance. You can see interesting examples running Google Earth and searching for different cities. It shows both the city limits polygon and the point picked up as center.
In particular, for London, the center is the statue just south of Trafalgar Square, while for Paris and New York it is the city hall. For Madrid it is the "Puerta del Sol" plaza, that happens to be the origin for road distances in Spain.
An interesting case is also the city where I live, Montreal: due to many mergers and de-mergers of various municipalities, the city boundary has absolutely nothing in common with a polygon.
Conclusion: it's a mess 
Mircea
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great info for the algorithm
diligent hands rule....
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Traditionally, the answer is the location of the post office
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Some places that could be the defining point. Larger cities may have several post offices, making it ambiguous. Smaller places may not have a post office (here in Norway we are making great efforts to completely kill the postal service!).
There are several other options: I have mentioned the church tower, the railroad station and the city hall. In Norway, lots of towns are located on rivers, with a town bridge connecting the east and west, or maybe north and south part of the town. The midpoint of the bridge is considered the midpoint of the town/village.
So: There are so many alternatives for identifying the center of a city / town / village that you cannot state one as The Rule.
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Yeah if you have more than one, the GPO is probably in that town. That was historically true, post offices are disappearing here as well.
Norway is ace, BTW. Saw Rammstein and went to a burger restaurant run by the guys from In Flames
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Christian Graus wrote: went to a burger restaurant run by the guys from In Flames
2112 is next to my office in Gothenburg, which incidentally does not lie in Norway. 
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In most Aussie cities it's the GPO, also used as zero point for road distances.
Not long after I moved to Sydney ('burbs) half a century ago, I happened across the Obelisk of Distances[^]
Apparently when it was erected it was roughly the centroid of the then settlelement.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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I believe it is the location of the largest Post Office that has been used traditionally.
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that IS an interesting question.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Given the other responses you might also ask who gets to decide which spot to use (regardless of how)?
Might also be relevant to wonder what happens if that is some landmark that ends up moving in the future?
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Wikipedia lists the city centre for most cities. You can click on the link and see precisely where it is, on your fav map/satellite website. As for London it is neither the GPO nor St Paul's cathedral, it is in the middle of the street, just off Trafalgar Sq, as mentioned by many. In Stockholm, it is not a building either, it is off centre in the square facing the Opera.
By what administrative method these were picked? Good question.
EDIT:
It may also be noted that the GPS coordinates on Wikipedia, do not include the "last" decimal. By last I mean the last explicit decimal in the ensuing URL, on Googmaps. One can change this "last" decimal and see pin move a few metres. This rounding might explain why the pins are displayed near, but still off, significant landmarks.
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
modified 14-Nov-23 17:35pm.
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Or altitude. At lease with Denver we actually have a special color (purple) in Coors Field and on the steps of the capital building indicating 5280 feet above sea level.
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#Worldle #661 3/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜↗️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
that weird part of asia
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I <insert words="" i="" don't="" want="" peoplle="" to="" know="" what="" am="" thinking=""> angry.
In the past, I could plug in my phone and copy photos off of it to MY disk drive. Not today. Today, it gets automatically uploaded to the cloud on my Windows Pro 11 laptop. Anyway to stop it? Nope? Anyway to access the device itself? Working on it.
The information sharing and pillaging is out of control.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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and it's all trying to push me to network storage, one drive, blah. Die you bastards.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I disconnect from the network at all times when I am not actively doing network operations (such as browsing CP). All my text editing, software development, photo/video editing etc. is done off line. I am still on Win10, with no plans to switch - which would require me to buy a new PC. I guess that even Win11 allows you to open 'Network connections' as a small window in the screen corner, and doubleclick it when your need to check something on the internet, and right click / Disable when that task is done.
My first network experience was with 110 bps (!) modems. In those days, we pre-punched our emails on paper tape before calling the BBS, reading in our paper tape and having all mail from others, including entries in those BBS discussion forums that we participated in. Later, when modems reached 1200 bps, we could send emails stored in disk files, and others' discussion entries were stored directly on disk.
So to me, being online only periodically works perfectly fine. I do not think that it limits my work at all. If I need any net service, it takes a doubleclick to open the net, and closing it is almost as simple. So rejecting that rather cloudy storage option is straightforward with me.
Another thing is that some of my writings, and some of the photos from when I was the daddy of a little girl, would have to be encrypted if I were to store them in any cloudy storage. As long as I keep my family photo archive on offline disks, there is no real need to encrypt them. At least not in this country. If I were to move to GOC. I guess that I would have to encrypt even the disks in my home.
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No, in the beginning was a db25 serial port, and thost made yer own cables man. And booted up the old pdp 11/70 by throwing pretty plastic pink and purple switches on or off in ancient octal. If you did that right and made your cable right minding rts and dtr handshakes if required, you might get the holy boot scriptures to come out on the teletype.
Someone will come along and say how soft we had it doing the former and all about the punch cards. To the card punch coders, Dilly - Dilly!
modified 14-Nov-23 8:20am.
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I have a vague recollection that the 20mA current loop on the ASR33 I used at school had a different connector - possibly a DB9, and that was a relatively modern interface, having been introduced in the 60's.
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