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Great question. London is amazing for being able to walk around, and has amazing transit. I honestly love your city, and may move there someday for it. This is mostly because London embraced transit in the early 20th century.
America went the other way, and embraced the car, and that pushed for the "American Dream". Suburbs became the normal, where people wanted an independent house farther away from the city. From there bred new problems, people needed to be able to drive their car there, which meant we needed more parking, which meant that things became further and further away.
You can actually blame parking for most of America's sprawl. Parking eats up a ton of space, and requires large roads to get people where they need to go and then massive parking lots for people to park their cars. Parking lots you can't even understand in your London mind. Then there are new problems - the parking lots are so massive that now you can't even walk to the building next door because it's half a mile just to walk to that place! So people get in their cars to drive across the street to park in the next place. This isn't exaggerated, that's just how it is. Take a look at this shopping center in Des Moines, a city where I grew up.
Americans designed cities for cars, not people. There is no way that areas like that were built for humans to move around in, it was built for people to drive to. Greenspace or walkways are not a thing, you are meant to park, walk for hundreds of meters to the front of the door, shop, and then get back in your car and drive across the big street to go to dinner. (To boot, most places won't let you leave your car either, if you're done shopping you need to move it).
The real problem is that this is all by design. We kill so much space in our cities so that drivers feel more comfortable. Honestly, I really appreciate London and how well they've done. Remember all of this next time your PM wants to "make it easier for drivers". No. Fuck the drivers. They're driving their huge metal car into your city, and wanting to have it take up space all so they don't have to walk or take a train/bus. They should have to pay extra for renting space from the city.
Amazing video on why parking is so freaking stupid in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
London (like much of Western Europe) was heavily demolished during WWII, so had to rebuild.
While during the same period the US was the opposite - it had an explosion of manufacturing growth during WWII, and having it dispersed made sense in numerous ways - it's where the population was, or where space was available to easily expand, or where certain resources were, or even was far enough away from population for safety reasons (see uranium enrichment at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, which is now largely an open space because you simply can't reclaim that soil with all the uranium dust buried in it). You can see this in many cities where the old industrial areas are being reclaimed and converted to housing, shopping, entertainment, etc.
So you have 19th century engineering used during massive manufacturing growth ((because it was established and many older engineers (beyond draft age) had years of experience with it) in the US, while Europe saw destruction of lots of 19th century (and earlier) development.
Rebuilding happened during the mid-20th. So why wouldn't you use the newest engineering.
In the US I once worked at a company manufacturing leather belts for factories that still had drive shafts running equipment. They were also using lathes from WWII, because it was precise enough for the assembly line machinery which was similar in age. Upgrading would cost more than it was worth (this was in the early 2000's). I suspect their entire plant was built during WWII.
One way to look at it - in land space, the US is equivalent to 16 western OECD countries. Comparing a single European country to the US is meaningless. Better to compare most of the EU, and even then historical events, and political borders make for very different results.
Sure, there are a dozen reasons for why we went one route and they went another. I'm not declaring "why" it happened, but these things happened differently in each country, stirring in a few other nicely added oil and gas collusion (like buying up US transit and tearing it up to make more room for cars and throwing in some fearmongering causing white flight out of cities to suburbs) and we get where we are.
We had more space, but in terms of cities it's the same thing. Other people are comparing the space in terms of country size. I'm talking about space in terms of city size and shape. London rebuilt during that time, during that time our cities were growing. Both were building for different reasons, and we both chose radically different approaches.
Just because we have more space doesn't mean that we use it well - or that we even needed to. Our cities sprawl because of stupid politics like minimum parking. London could continue sprawling, Paris could, many many cities could. Our politics actively encouraged it, and now we have giant ugly sprawling 1 story garbage everywhere.