Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free London Landmarks trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
London's skyline is a 900-year argument between builders. A Norman hall shares a site with a Victorian clock tower; a 1980s bank headquarters hides its own logo in its floor plan; a bridge sold to an American ended up in the desert, and a footbridge had to close within days because of how people walk. These 50 questions go past the postcard view. They ask who designed the arches, palaces and galleries, what stood on the sites before, how tall things are and since when, why certain towers are shaped the way they are, and which statues and bridges carry stories most visitors walk straight past. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds the detail guidebooks skip. Play it before a trip, test a Londoner who thinks they know the city, or print it for a quiz night with a capital theme.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Parliament rename the structure that houses Big Ben in 2012, to mark a Diamond Jubilee?
Elizabeth Tower
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.
Q 02The Monument to the Great Fire stands 202 feet tall because that is exactly its distance from what?
Thomas Farriner's bakery
Thomas Farriner's bakery, where the 1666 blaze began, lies 202 feet east of the column; 311 steps spiral up to its viewing platform.
Q 03Which Bankside footbridge closed two days after opening because crowds made it sway?
Millennium Bridge
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.
Q 04Which City tower's concave glass scorched parked cars with reflected sunlight in 2013?
The Walkie-Talkie
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'.
Q 05The granite of the 1831 London Bridge was shipped in 1968 to a new lakeside town in which US state?
Arizona
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.
Q 06Which Gulf state owns 95 per cent of the Shard after bankrolling it when funding collapsed in 2008?
Qatar
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.
Q 07Which band photographed an inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station for its 1977 album Animals?
Pink Floyd
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.
Q 08Lutyens's Cenotaph in Whitehall, unveiled in 1920, takes its name from Greek words meaning what?
Empty tomb
Empty tomb is the literal meaning, and the Portland stone memorial replaced a temporary original put up for a 1919 victory parade.
Q 09Which emblem of old Wembley Stadium came down in December 2002, to be replaced by a 133-metre arch?
The Twin Towers
The Twin Towers had stood since 1923; the arch that replaced them carries more than three-quarters of the new roof's load.
Q 10The winged statue at Piccadilly Circus, popularly called Eros, actually depicts which Greek god?
Anteros
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.
Q 11Which architect won the competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834?
Charles Barry
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.
Q 12The 1834 fire that destroyed the medieval Palace of Westminster was started by the burning of what?
Exchequer tally sticks
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.
Q 13The Parliamentary Archives fill 12 floors of which structure, the Palace of Westminster's tallest?
Q 21Each London Eye capsule, 10 tonnes and holding 25 people, stands for one of London's what?
Boroughs
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.
Q 22Who refaced Buckingham Palace's familiar balcony front in Portland stone in 1913 for George V?
Aston Webb
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.
Q 23Which gateway, built as Buckingham Palace's state entrance, moved to Hyde Park's corner in 1851?
Marble Arch
Victoria Tower
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.
Q 14Which king commissioned Westminster Hall's oak hammerbeam roof, built by Hugh Herland, in 1393?
Richard II
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.
Q 15What originally pumped the pressurised water that raised Tower Bridge's bascules for shipping?
Steam engines
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.
Q 16Tower Bridge's high-level walkways, closed in 1910, had gained a reputation as a haunt of whom?
Pickpockets and prostitutes
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.
Q 17The Gherkin stands where which shipping marketplace stood until a 1992 IRA bomb wrecked it?
The Baltic Exchange
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.
Q 18The Leadenhall Building's wedge shape protects the sightline of St Paul's dome from where?
Fleet Street
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.
Q 19Who designed the Lloyd's building of 1986, with its lifts, ducts and pipes hung on the outside?
Richard Rogers
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.
Q 20Which pyramid-topped tower was the UK's tallest building from 1991 to 2012?
One Canada Square
One Canada Square held the title for 21 years; its pyramid roof carries a flashing aircraft warning light, a rarity on British buildings.
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.
Q 24Trafalgar Square's empty fourth plinth was built in 1841 for an equestrian statue of which king?
William IV
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.
Q 25The four bronze lions at the foot of Nelson's Column were added in 1867 to designs by which painter?
Edwin Landseer
Edwin Landseer, famous for painting animals, designed the four identical Barbary lions more than two decades after the column itself was finished in 1843.
Q 26Admiralty Arch at the end of the Mall hides what oddly shaped bump inside its northernmost archway?
A human nose
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.
Q 27Temple Bar, the 1672 gateway taken down in 1878, was re-erected in 2004 in which piazza by St Paul's?
Paternoster Square
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.
Q 28Which holiday-camp firm ran the Post Office Tower's revolving restaurant from 1966 to 1980?
Butlin's
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.
Q 29Labour ran its 1997 election campaign from which 1963 block, once briefly the UK's tallest building?
Millbank Tower
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.
Q 30Tower 42, built for NatWest, has a floor plan that from above forms the bank's logo: what shape?
Three chevrons
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.