Why a town is where it is
In medieval England you could not simply open a MARKET. You needed a charter from the king, and a thirteenth-century legal rule held that no new market could be founded within six and two-thirds miles of an existing one.
The number came from a calculation about people rather than land. A reasonable day was reckoned as twenty miles of walking: a third of it to get to market, a third to trade, a third to get home before dark. Look at a map of English market towns today and they are still sitting roughly that far apart, spaced out by an argument about how far a person could walk with a goose.
Very few settlements chose their spot at random. Most grew where a ROAD had to meet a river — at a shallow crossing, or later at a BRIDGE — because that is where everyone was forced to slow down, and where somebody could charge them for the privilege.
English place names give the game away. Oxford and Bradford and Stratford were fords; Cambridge, Bridgwater and Tonbridge were crossings. Later the railway did the same thing all over again, and towns like Crewe and Swindon exist almost entirely because a STATION was put there first and the houses followed.
Size has nothing to do with being a city
In the United Kingdom a town becomes a city when the monarch says so, and not before. St Davids in Wales has around 1,600 residents and is a city. Reading has well over 170,000 and is not, having applied three times and been turned down each time.
Other countries use rules instead of gifts. In much of the United States a place becomes a city by incorporating itself under state law, leaving some American cities with a few hundred residents and a mayor. In France the word commune covers Paris and a hamlet of forty people equally.
Somebody had to make libraries free
Until 1850 a public LIBRARY in Britain generally meant one you paid to join. The Public Libraries Act let town councils charge a halfpenny rate to fund one for everybody, and it passed narrowly against MPs who argued that giving working people free books would encourage them to stop working.
Then a steel magnate spent his fortune on the idea. Andrew Carnegie, who had left school at thirteen, paid for more than 2,500 library buildings around the world on one condition: the town had to supply the land and promise to fund the books forever. Hundreds of them are still lending.
A walk round the grid
Places that sell you something: the SHOP, STORE, MARKET, BAKERY, CAFE, GARAGE and BANK. Places that do something for you: the SCHOOL, LIBRARY, HOSPITAL and CHURCH. Places to enjoy yourself: the PARK, MUSEUM, ZOO and swimming POOL. And the connecting tissue — the ROAD, the BRIDGE and the STATION — with your own HOUSE or HOME somewhere among it.
Nearly every town on earth assembles itself from that same short list, in wildly different materials and languages. Working out which building does which job is the first geography a child ever does, and it usually starts with noticing that the BAKERY smells better than the BANK.