The current location of London was selected as the site of the future capital of Upper Canada in 1793 by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, who also named the village which was founded in 1826. It did not become the capital Simcoe envisioned. Rather, it was an administrative seat for the area west of the actual capital, York (now Toronto). Locally, it was part of the Talbot Settlement, named for Colonel Thomas Talbot, the chief coloniser of the area, who oversaw the land surveying and built the first government buildings for the administration of the western Ontario peninsular region. Together with the rest of southwestern Ontario, the village benefited from Talbot's provisions not only for building and maintaining roads but also for assignment of access priorities to main routes to productive land. Crown and clergy reserves then received preference in the rest of Ontario.