London – it's quite busy, isn't it? But maybe more than you even realise.

As of this time last year, 8.6 million people call Greater London their home.

That makes London a LOT bigger than other UK cities. You could fit people from all these city districts into London, for example:

Admittedly we're cheating a little, because just as 'London' is much bigger than just the central district, so 'Greater Manchester' is much bigger than just the middle bit of Manchester.

But even if you take entire metropolitan counties, you can still fit everyone from five of the country's biggest into Greater London:

See? There's loads of us. Who else could you fit in London?

Yep, there are more Londoners than Scottish (5.3 million) and Welsh people (3.0 million) put together.

How about some American cities? You could fit the citizens from these all places comfortably inside the Big Smoke:

In fact, we're even bigger than all these countries combined:

Come to think of it, London is also more populous than Israel, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand and Jamaica... to name but a few. (If we became our own country, we'd be the 96th largest – just a few thousand people smaller than Austria.)

If this is all making your blood pressure rise, just be glad you don't live in Shanghai, which at 24 million people (nearly three times the size of London) is the largest city in the world:

Finally, a snappy demographic fact to impress someone on a first date: if you drained the blood from every living Londoner, it would be enough to fill 16.2 Olympic size swimming pools. Mmm... blood pool.

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