xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech
Alt text:
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
This is the real reason for English city names being Like That. It's just the locals getting tired of using five syllables, and then four, and then three, over the course of literally a thousand years.
We might find out the original name of London was Welsh before the Romans arrived to write it down.