The city is pretty central as far as I see it. Although I agree
for shopping, touristing and (perhaps) dining, the centre is
more westish; there are good historical reasons why such
places have names like Westminster and the West End.
In terms of modern London though, I take it as defined by the M25, and on that scale, the everything from Greenwich to White City is pretty much central.
There are good historical reasons, yes, but the balance shifted about 200 years ago. For a long time Charing Cross was treated as a semi-official designation of the centre point of London, for good reason.
> In terms of modern London though, I take it as defined by the M25, and on that scale, the everything from Greenwich to White City is pretty much central.
If you take expansive definitions like that, sure. But if e.g. people tell you they're "going in to London", odds are they're talking about Westminster unless they happen to work in banking.
There are endless definitions of this, but the point I was making is that when people think of London, City is rarely what they're thinking of. You see it even in the article, where they chose to lead with a picture from the centre of Westminster and describes it as "in the heart of London".
EDIT: This is particularly relevant in context of your original comment about the "essential purpose" of London: Westminster was nerver part of Roman London/Londinium - it was formed as a separate town. It's purpose was entirely different. What you describe as central London includes a number of other old towns with entirely different purposes to City.
Does that still work when applying the same logic to New York ? So the World Trade Center and Wall Street are not exactly central, and chances are, if you aren't going there unless you work in finance. When people talk about New York that's mostly Time Square and what's within at most 1 mile circle around. That seems strange to me.
I am not quite sure what point you are trying to prove, the City is mapped in full even on the most restrictive tourist map. It contains the Tower Bridge, the Tower of London. It is in Zone 1 of the tube. Except for some geographical and political quirks, I can't believe anybody, especially not Londoners, are going to be mislead by the article assumption.
I'm not trying to prove anything. The point was very simple: That City is different from what most people will think of when thinking of the centre of London. Even if you consider it part of the centre, it is at most a small part of it. I made it simply because people who don't live here often get confused by that distinction and think that City refers to London as a whole. The comment I replied to, appeared to try to extrapolate from the history of City to central London as a whole, for example, but City and the rest have very different histories and have been different cities for most of their history.
Counterintuitively, the City of London isn't truly part of Greater London - it's maybe closer to the financial equivalent of the Vatican State in Rome.
In some ways it isn't even part of England or the UK. It has its own administrative, legal, and financial structures, it owns significant prime land around the rest of London, it has its own police force, and it even has its own political representative in Westminster (unelected, of course).
People are often confused by this, because if they think about it at all they assume the City is a trading district where the banks live.
But it's a lot more than that. Its role in British and world history is huge. Its influence is also shadowy and relatively poorly documented, which is an interesting thing in itself.
In terms of modern London though, I take it as defined by the M25, and on that scale, the everything from Greenwich to White City is pretty much central.