Do you know which town(s) across the world your London borough is twinned with?
All but five of London's 32 boroughs (plus the City of London) have close cultural ties to other towns and cities — a relationship often known as 'twinning'.
For many of us, town twinning rarely affects our day to day lives. Perhaps we see the odd photo of a group of German exchange students appearing in the local paper, or we clock a foreign name on a borough boundary sign.
Many town-twinning arrangements predate the modern London boroughs system, and were absorbed into the appropriate boroughs when they were introduced. Town twinning became popular shortly after the Second World War, in an attempt to forge links and understanding between different cultures.
The map above shows the twin towns of each borough (full list below). We've only used official, borough-wide twin towns on this map (so towns that are twinned with specific institutions such as schools and choirs, rather than the borough as a whole, have not been included).
A few random observations from making the map:
- It's not always easy to uncover twin towns. In some cases, the arrangement was made decades ago, and has fallen fallow. We invite any corrections, where we might have missed a dormant relationship, or included a twin town that no longer considers itself twinned.
- The boroughs with the most twin towns are jointly Barnet, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Haringey, with eight apiece.
- Only Camden is twinned with a town in England (Doncaster), an arrangement that came about in the 1980s in solidarity with striking miners.
- The Royal Borough of Richmond is the only one twinned with a namesake — Richmond, Virginia (USA). That said, Bexley is twinned with Footscray, Melbourne (Australia), which was named after Foot's Cray in Bexley.
- The most common way to twin is to pair up with part of Paris. 12 boroughs do this.
- Charlottenberg-Wilmersdorf in Germany is twinned with two London boroughs: both Sutton and Lewisham.
- Twinning can be controversial. Hackney's oldest twin is Haifa in Israel. The relationship has recently drawn protests from pro-Palestinian campaigners.
Here are all the twinning relationships for every borough that has them.
Barking & Dagenham
- Witten, Germany
- Tczew, Poland
Barnet
- Chaville, France
- Jinga, Uganda
- Le Raincy, France
- Montclair, USA
- Morphou, Cyprus
- Ramat Gan, Israel
- Siegen-Wittgenstein, Germany
- Tempelhof, Germany
Bexley
- Evry, France
- Arnsberg, Germany
Brent
- South Dublin, Ireland
Bromley
- Neuwied, Germany
Camden
- Doncaster, UK
Croydon
- Arnhem, Netherlands
Ealing
- Marcq-en-Baroeul, France
- Bielany, Poland
- Kreis-Steinfurt, Germany
Enfield
- Courbevoie, France
- Gladbeck, Germany
- Halandri, Greece
- Sariyer, Turkey
Greenwich
- Berlin-Reinickendorf, Germany
- Maribor, Slovenia
- Tema, Ghana
Hackney
- Suresnes, France
- Haifa, Israel
- Grenada, West Indies
Hammersmith & Fulham
- Berlin-Neukoelln, Germany
- Boulogne-Billancourt, France
- Anderlecht, Belgium
- Siemiatycze, Poland
- Rzeszów, Poland
- Sopot, Poland
- Montefiore Conca, Italy
- Zaandam, Netherlands
Haringey
- Arima, Trinidad
- Clarendon, Jamaica
- Holetown, Barbados
- Jalasjärvi, Finland
- Koblenz, Germany
- Larnaca, Cyprus
- Livry-Gargan, France
- Sundbyberg, Sweden
Harrow
- Douai, France
Havering
- Ludwigshafen am Rhein, Germany
- Hesdin, France
Hillingdon
- Schleswig, Germany
- Mantes-la-Jolie, France
Hounslow
- Issy-les-Moulineaux, France
- Lahore, Pakistan
- Jalandhar, India
- Ramallah, Palestine
Kensington & Chelsea
- Cannes, France
Kingston
- Oldenburg, Germany
- Gwanak-gu, South Korea
Lewisham
- Antony, France
- Charlottenburg, Germany
- Kingston, Jamaica
Newham
- Kaiserslauten, Germany
Richmond Upon Thames
- Richmond, Virginia, USA,
- Konstanz, Germany
- Fontainebleau, France
Southwark
- Langenhagen, Germany
- Clichy, France
- Cambridge, MA (USA)
Sutton
- Wilmersdorf, Germany
- Minden, Germany
- Gagny, France
- Gladsaxe, Denmark
Waltham Forest
- Sainte-Mandé, France
- Wandsbek, Germany
- St Johns, Antigua and Barbuda
- Roseau, the Commonwealth of Dominica
- Mirpur, Pakistan
Wandsworth
- Villers-Plouich, France (informal)
