50 Fun Facts About London Landmarks

What did Parliament rename the structure that houses Big Ben in 2012, to mark a Diamond Jubilee?

Elizabeth Tower had simply been called the Clock Tower since it was built in the 1850s; the House of Commons voted for the change on 2 June 2012.

The Monument to the Great Fire stands 202 feet tall because that is exactly its distance from what?

Thomas Farriner's bakery, where the 1666 blaze began, lies 202 feet east of the column; 311 steps spiral up to its viewing platform.

Which Bankside footbridge closed two days after opening because crowds made it sway?

Millennium Bridge earned the nickname 'Wobbly Bridge' when walkers unconsciously fell into step with its sideways sway; it reopened in February 2002 after Arup tested the fixes with 700 staff.

Which City tower's concave glass scorched parked cars with reflected sunlight in 2013?

The Walkie-Talkie's concave south face focused a beam up to six times brighter than direct sunlight, with street readings of 117 °C; the press dubbed it the 'Walkie-Scorchie'.

The granite of the 1831 London Bridge was shipped in 1968 to a new lakeside town in which US state?

Arizona's Lake Havasu City got the bridge for $2.46 million from chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch, who always denied the rumour that he thought he was buying Tower Bridge.

Which Gulf state owns 95 per cent of the Shard after bankrolling it when funding collapsed in 2008?

Qatar's investors paid £150 million for an 80 per cent stake in 2008 and now hold 95 per cent, leaving developer Sellar Property with the rest.

Which band photographed an inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station for its 1977 album Animals?

Pink Floyd shot the Animals cover in December 1976 at a station that ranks among the world's largest brick buildings, now home to Apple's UK offices.

Lutyens's Cenotaph in Whitehall, unveiled in 1920, takes its name from Greek words meaning what?

Empty tomb is the literal meaning, and the Portland stone memorial replaced a temporary original put up for a 1919 victory parade.

Which emblem of old Wembley Stadium came down in December 2002, to be replaced by a 133-metre arch?

The Twin Towers had stood since 1923; the arch that replaced them carries more than three-quarters of the new roof's load.

The winged statue at Piccadilly Circus, popularly called Eros, actually depicts which Greek god?

Anteros, the god of selfless love, was Alfred Gilbert's choice to honour the philanthropist Earl of Shaftesbury; the figure was the world's first statue cast in aluminium.

Which architect won the competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834?

Charles Barry chose Perpendicular Gothic but, inexperienced in the style, leaned heavily on Augustus Pugin for the detail; the build took 30 years and outlived them both.

The 1834 fire that destroyed the medieval Palace of Westminster was started by the burning of what?

Exchequer tally sticks, notched willow used to record debts until 1826, were being burned as rubbish when the blaze took most of the medieval palace.

The Parliamentary Archives fill 12 floors of which structure, the Palace of Westminster's tallest?

Victoria Tower rises 98.5 metres, 2.2 metres higher than the clock tower most people assume is the tallest, and once ranked as the world's tallest square tower.

Which king commissioned Westminster Hall's oak hammerbeam roof, built by Hugh Herland, in 1393?

Richard II's roof crowned a hall first raised in 1097, then one of the largest in Europe; its oak came from royal forests in Hampshire, Surrey and Hertfordshire.

What originally pumped the pressurised water that raised Tower Bridge's bascules for shipping?

Steam engines pumped water to 750 psi into accumulators so the bascules could lift for passing ships; the system went electro-hydraulic in the 1970s.

Tower Bridge's high-level walkways, closed in 1910, had gained a reputation as a haunt of whom?

Pickpockets and prostitutes had the walkways largely to themselves because few people bothered with the stairs; they reopened as part of the exhibition, with glass floors added in 2014.

The Gherkin stands where which shipping marketplace stood until a 1992 IRA bomb wrecked it?

The Baltic Exchange traded shipping freight contracts there; its salvaged glass dome is echoed by the Gherkin's own 'Lens' and now sits in the National Maritime Museum.

The Leadenhall Building's wedge shape protects the sightline of St Paul's dome from where?

Fleet Street's protected view of the cathedral is why the 225-metre tower leans away from it; planner Peter Rees named it the Cheesegrater after imagining the architect's wife grating parmesan on it.

Who designed the Lloyd's building of 1986, with its lifts, ducts and pipes hung on the outside?

Richard Rogers's 'inside-out' design won Grade I listing in 2011, the youngest building ever to get it, though the exposed services make maintenance ruinously expensive.

Which pyramid-topped tower was the UK's tallest building from 1991 to 2012?

One Canada Square held the title for 21 years; its pyramid roof carries a flashing aircraft warning light, a rarity on British buildings.

Each London Eye capsule, 10 tonnes and holding 25 people, stands for one of London's what?

Boroughs get a capsule each, and riders can walk about inside as the wheel turns; the pods are numbered 1 to 33 because 13 was skipped for superstition.

Who refaced Buckingham Palace's familiar balcony front in Portland stone in 1913 for George V?

Aston Webb's facade, described as 'like everybody's idea of a palace', faces the Mall, which Webb also laid out as the ceremonial approach in 1911.

Which gateway, built as Buckingham Palace's state entrance, moved to Hyde Park's corner in 1851?

Marble Arch was faced with Carrara marble and modelled on Rome's Arch of Constantine; its attic rooms served as a police station for over a century.

Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth was built in 1841 for an equestrian statue of which king?

William IV's statue was never funded, so the plinth sat bare until the late 1990s, when the RSA began filling it with contemporary sculpture.

The four bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's Column were added in 1867 to designs by which painter?

Edwin Landseer, famous for painting animals, designed the four identical Barbary lions more than two decades after the column itself was finished in 1843.

Admiralty Arch at the end of the Mall hides what oddly shaped bump inside its northernmost archway?

A human nose, set about seven feet up, sits at waist height for anyone riding through on horseback; the arch was Edward VII's memorial to his late mother.

Temple Bar, the 1672 gateway taken down in 1878, was re-erected in 2004 in which piazza by St Paul's?

Paternoster Square got the 1672 arch back after more than a century as a gatehouse at Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire; a dragon-topped memorial marks its old spot.

Which holiday-camp firm ran the Post Office Tower's revolving restaurant from 1966 to 1980?

Butlin's Top of the Tower turned once every 23 minutes on the 34th floor; the building was later renamed Telecom Tower and, in 1991, BT Tower.

Labour ran its 1997 election campaign from which 1963 block, once briefly the UK's tallest building?

Millbank Tower was built for Vickers and lost the title within a year; it has since housed the UN, the Conservatives and Reform UK as well as Labour.

Tower 42, built for NatWest, has a floor plan that from above forms the bank's logo: what shape?

Three chevrons in a hexagon make up the NatWest logo and the building's footprint; at 183 metres it opened in 1980 as the UK's tallest building.

Why did Centre Point, the 1966 tower above Tottenham Court Road station, stand empty until 1975?

Its owner wanted a single tenant and developer Harry Hyams refused to let floors separately, so the block earned the tag 'London's Empty Skyscraper'.

Which arts complex, opened by the Queen in March 1982, was voted London's ugliest building in 2003?

The Barbican Centre was the City of London's £161 million gift to the nation, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in raw concrete Brutalism.

Prince Charles called Lasdun's concrete National Theatre a clever way of building what in London?

A nuclear power station 'in the middle of London without anyone objecting' was the 1988 verdict on a building since re-read as closer to Le Corbusier than to Brutalism.

Which 1951 celebration gave the South Bank the first post-war building ever to be Grade I listed?

The Festival of Britain opened the Royal Festival Hall on 3 May 1951 with a gala conducted by Malcolm Sargent and Adrian Boult; the hall was listed in 1981.

Which tea clipper, dry-docked at Greenwich since 1954, caught fire in 2007 during conservation work?

Cutty Sark, one of the last and fastest tea clippers, spent only a few years on the China run before the Suez Canal handed the trade to steamships.

The O2 arena's tent in Greenwich is held up by twelve 100-metre yellow masts, one for each what?

Month of the year is the official reading, or hour on a clock face as a nod to Greenwich Mean Time, and the tent is 365 metres across, one metre for every day.

Which building housed the BBC's first regular television service from 1936?

Alexandra Palace was gutted by fire 16 days after opening in 1873, was rebuilt, and its mast still transmits; Haringey's coat of arms carries lightning bolts for the TV first.

Rebuilt at Sydenham after the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace met what fate in 1936?

It burned down in November 1936 after 82 years on Sydenham Hill, and the name lives on in the park, the football club and the transmitter.

What replaced 'Dippy' the Diplodocus cast in the Natural History Museum's central hall in 2017?

A blue whale skeleton now dives from the ceiling of Alfred Waterhouse's terracotta 'cathedral of nature', a building clad to shrug off Victorian soot.

Why did J. M. Barrie have the Peter Pan statue erected in Kensington Gardens overnight in 1912?

So children would credit fairies with it, Barrie announced in The Times the next morning; the bronze stands where Peter lands in The Little White Bird.

Which royal consort had Hyde Park's 40-acre Serpentine lake created in 1730?

Queen Caroline's lake drank from the River Westbourne until 1834, when pollution forced engineers to pump water from the tidal Thames instead.

Henry VIII took the land that became Hyde Park in 1536 as a hunting ground from which institution?

Westminster Abbey had owned the manor of Hyde through the Middle Ages, using its woods for firewood and game cover, until the king helped himself.

Which architect laid out Regent's Park and its white stucco terraces for the future George IV?

John Nash designed the park with James and Decimus Burton, ringing it with the elegant white stucco terraces that still line its south, east and west sides.

Whose 1797 cartoon gave the Bank of England the nickname 'the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street'?

James Gillray's satirical print coined the name; the bank has occupied Threadneedle Street since 1734, on the site of Sir John Houblon's house and garden.

The Imperial War Museum's south London home since 1936 was built as which notorious institution?

Bethlem Royal Hospital vacated the building for Beckenham in Kent, and the museum moved in from cramped rooms at the Imperial Institute.

Which poet led the campaign that got St Pancras station listed ten days before demolition was due?

John Betjeman's statue now stands in the station, whose single-span Barlow train shed was the largest enclosed space in the world when it opened in 1868.

The Oxo Tower's windows spell out the brand because its owners were refused permission for what?

Lit-up advertisements were refused, so the 1920s meat-extract firm built four sets of three windows shaped, 'coincidentally', as a circle, a cross and a circle.

How does the gilded Lady Justice on the Old Bailey's dome differ from the usual image of the figure?

She is not blindfolded because, the court's brochures argue, her 'maidenly form' guarantees impartiality; she holds a sword in her right hand and scales in her left.

Shakespeare's Globe of 1997 claims the first what permitted in London since the 1666 Great Fire?

A thatched roof, protected by fire retardants and sprinklers, tops the reconstruction Sam Wanamaker built about 230 metres from the original theatre's site.

Which familiar design is said to copy the stacked 226-foot steeple of Wren's St Bride's church?

The tiered wedding cake is credited to Thomas Rich, a baker's apprentice on Ludgate Hill who in 1703 drew on the steeple for an extravagant cake.