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 'the Clock Tower' since the 1850s; 'St Stephen's Tower' was only ever a nickname that Victorian journalists gave it.

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, lay 202 feet from the column; an inscription on its base blamed Catholics for the fire until the words were chiselled off in 1830.

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

Millennium Bridge earned the nickname 'Wobbly Bridge' when walkers fell into step with its sideways sway and made it worse; it reopened in February 2002 after dampers were fitted.

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

The Walkie-Talkie's concave glass worked like a curved mirror, melting panels on a parked Jaguar; a permanent sunshade was fitted to the tower in 2014.

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's investors rescued the Shard's funding in 2008 and came to own most of the tower?

Qatar's investors bought out two of the tower's three original backers in January 2008, after months of doubt over whether the Shard would ever be built.

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

Pink Floyd's 40-foot pig broke free during the shoot in December 1976, drifted across Heathrow's flight lanes and came down that night on a farm in Kent.

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 the old Wembley Stadium was demolished to make way for a new ground crowned by a giant arch?

The Twin Towers had stood since 1923; the top of one was kept as a memorial in a nearby park, while the arch that replaced them carries over three-quarters of the new roof's load.

The winged archer at Piccadilly Circus, popularly called Eros, was meant by its sculptor to be which Greek god?

Anteros, the god of selfless love, was Alfred Gilbert's choice to honour the philanthropist Earl of Shaftesbury; the figure was one of the first statues ever 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 wood once used to record payments, were stuffed into the furnaces under the House of Lords, and the overheated flues set the chamber above alight.

Until 2025 the Parliamentary Archives were kept in which structure, the Palace of Westminster's tallest?

Victoria Tower rises 98.5 metres, higher than the palace's famous clock tower; it was built as a store for Parliament's records, which have since been moved to The National Archives at Kew.

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

Richard II's roof spans the whole hall without a single column; its oak frames were made near Farnham in Surrey and carried to Westminster by wagon and barge.

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

Steam engines pumped water into six accumulators that stored the pressure until a ship needed the bascules raised; 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 moved the services outside to leave the floors within clear; in 2011, just 25 years old, it became the youngest building at that date to win Grade I listing.

Which pyramid-topped tower was the UK's tallest building for two decades until the Shard overtook it?

One Canada Square was the centrepiece of Canary Wharf, whose developer Olympia & York collapsed into bankruptcy in 1992, a year after the tower was finished.

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', was built as a backdrop to the Victoria Memorial and looks down the Mall, the ceremonial route he also designed.

Which gateway, built as Buckingham Palace's state entrance, was moved in 1851 to the north-east corner of Hyde Park?

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, a painter of animals, got the job in 1858 after a sculptor's stone lions were rejected, and his bronzes arrived only in 1867, 24 years after the column was finished.

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

A human nose was stuck there in 1997 by artist Rick Buckley, one of about 35 he fixed to London buildings in a protest against a 'Big Brother' society.

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 was still the tenant when a bomb exploded in a toilet near the top of the tower one night in 1971; the restaurant closed for good when the lease ran out in 1980.

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 height record within a year; Labour moved out in 2002, forced away by rent of £1 million a year.

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; after an IRA bomb wrecked the tower in 1993 the bank chose not to move back, and it was sold and renamed for its 42 cantilevered floors.

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

Its owner wanted a single tenant: developer Harry Hyams refused to let floors separately, and in 1974 housing campaigners occupied 'London's Empty Skyscraper' in protest.

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 gift to the nation, built on a district flattened by wartime bombing; its layout is so tangled that lines painted on the ground guide visitors in.

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 future king's 1988 verdict; six years later the theatre was given Grade II* listed status.

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 usual 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 it opened in 1873 and rebuilt within two years; the BBC leased part of it in 1935 as its television centre.

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 Kensington Gardens' Peter Pan statue erected 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 held the manor of Hyde for centuries; Henry fenced it in as a private deer park, and the general public were not let in until 1637.

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

John Nash's plan gave the Prince Regent a palace of his own in the park, but it was never built, and only a handful of the villas he drew for it went up.

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

James Gillray's 1797 print drew the Bank as an old lady fending off Prime Minister William Pitt, a jab at the switch from gold coin to paper money.

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

Bethlem Royal Hospital, the asylum whose nickname gave English the word 'bedlam', left for Beckenham in 1930; the museum moved into its old building six years later.

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 owners designed its famous windows after being 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 campaigned for but did not live to see open, about 230 metres from the original site.

Which familiar design is said to copy the steeple of Wren's St Bride's church in the City of London?

The tiered wedding cake is credited to a Ludgate Hill baker's apprentice named Rich, who is said to have modelled an extravagant cake on the steeple's stack of shrinking storeys.