London Landmarks Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
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 'the Clock Tower' since the 1850s; 'St Stephen's Tower' was only ever a nickname that Victorian journalists gave it.
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, lay 202 feet from the column; an inscription on its base blamed Catholics for the fire until the words were chiselled off in 1830.
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 fell into step with its sideways sway and made it worse; it reopened in February 2002 after dampers were fitted.
Q 04Which City tower's concave glass scorched parked cars with reflected sunlight in 2013?
The Walkie-Talkie
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.
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's investors rescued the Shard's funding in 2008 and came to own most of the tower?
Qatar
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.
Q 07Which band photographed an inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station for its 1977 album Animals?
Pink Floyd
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.
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 the old Wembley Stadium was demolished to make way for a new ground crowned by a giant arch?
The Twin Towers
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.
Q 10The winged archer at Piccadilly Circus, popularly called Eros, was meant by its sculptor to be 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 one of the first statues ever 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 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.
Q 13Until 2025 the Parliamentary Archives were kept in 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', was built as a backdrop to the Victoria Memorial and looks down the Mall, the ceremonial route he also designed.
Q 23Which gateway, built as Buckingham Palace's state entrance, was moved in 1851 to the north-east corner of Hyde Park?
Marble Arch
Victoria Tower
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.
Q 14Which king commissioned Westminster Hall's oak hammerbeam roof, built by Hugh Herland, in 1393?
Richard II
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.
Q 15What originally pumped the pressurised water that raised Tower Bridge's bascules for shipping?
Steam engines
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.
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 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.
Q 20Which pyramid-topped tower was the UK's tallest building for two decades until the Shard overtook it?
One Canada Square
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.
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, 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.
Q 26Admiralty Arch at the end of the Mall hides what oddly shaped bump inside its northernmost archway?
A human nose
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.
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 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.
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 height record within a year; Labour moved out in 2002, forced away by rent of £1 million a year.
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; 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.