Landmarks in London
39 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in London.
Borough Market & Southwark Cathedral
Borough Market — the covered food market around you, all stalls and shouted prices and the smell of a dozen different cuisines at once. People treat this as a modern foodie destination, and it is.
Brick Lane
Brick Lane. Right now, breathe in — depending which way the wind's going, you're getting frying onions and curry from one direction and hot fresh bagels from the other.
Buckingham Palace
There it is. Buckingham Palace. Seven hundred and seventy-five rooms, the balcony where the royal family waves, the front door on ten thousand postcards. And for most of its life, nobody actually wanted to live here.
Churchill War Rooms
Down those steps is the entrance to a bunker. During the Second World War, while German bombs were flattening the city above, Winston Churchill ran the entire war from a cramped basement under these government buildings.
Cleopatra's Needle
That tall pink granite spike by the river, with a bronze sphinx crouched on either side, is Cleopatra's Needle. And almost everything about that name is a lie. It has nothing to do with Cleopatra.
HMS Belfast
That grey warship moored in the river is HMS Belfast, and more than three hundred thousand people a year climb its nine decks to see what a Second World War cruiser actually looked like from the inside.
Houses of Parliament & Big Ben
That clock tower is the Elizabeth Tower, and the bell hanging inside it is Big Ben — not the tower, not the clock, the BELL. Thirteen and a half tonnes of metal. And the first thing nobody tells you about it: it's broken.
Leadenhall Market
Step into Leadenhall Market and look up — that ornate cream, green and maroon ironwork, the painted glass roof, the cobbles under your feet. It's gorgeous, it's Victorian, and if it looks a little magical, that's not an accident.
Old Spitalfields Market & the Silk Weavers
Old Spitalfields Market has been selling things on this spot since sixteen thirty-eight — nearly four hundred years of continuous trading, first in fruit and vegetables, now in flat whites and vintage denim.
Shakespeare's Globe
This round, timber-framed, thatched-roof building is Shakespeare's Globe, and it exists here, on this exact stretch of riverbank, because the City of London banned it from existing anywhere else.
Southbank Centre & the National Theatre
This whole stretch of concrete terraces and river-facing halls is the Southbank Centre, and none of it was supposed to still be here. It was built for a five-month party.
St Mary-le-Bow
This church is St Mary-le-Bow, and the bells up in that steeple decide, by law of tradition, who counts as a real Londoner.
St Paul's & the Blitz
Stand here and look up at that dome, because on one night in nineteen forty, it became the most important object in Britain — and it nearly didn't survive to see the morning.
St Paul's Cathedral
There it is. Saint Paul's. That dome is one of the most recognisable objects in the world, and everything about it is a rescue job after a disaster. Because there was a Saint Paul's here before this one, and it was, frankly, a mess.
Tate Modern
This enormous brick building with the single tall chimney is Tate Modern, and until the year two thousand it was doing a completely different job.
The Anchor, Bankside
That pub on the riverfront is the Anchor, and there has been a tavern standing on this exact spot for more than eight hundred years — which makes it, by most reckonings, the oldest surviving drinking spot on this whole stretch of the…
The Blind Beggar
The Blind Beggar. It's an ordinary pub, still serving pints today, and two completely opposite pieces of history happened on this one spot. One founded a global charity. The other was a murder.
The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid
On the corner here is a plain brick building that is, quietly, the best history lesson in London. It's a mosque now — the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, and on a Friday it fills with thousands of worshippers.
The Buried River Fleet
Look over the bridge at the river. Right below you, hidden in the stonework of the embankment, a second river empties into the Thames — one you'll never see flowing.
The Clink & the Golden Hinde
That narrow building is the Clink Prison Museum. It stands on the site of one of the oldest and most notorious prisons in England — old enough that "the Clink" became the generic English word for any jail at all.
The Cutty Sark
You are standing underneath a ship. A real one — thirty-odd metres of Victorian sailing clipper, hoisted three metres into the air so you can walk right beneath the hull that used to slice through the open ocean.
The London Eye
That's the London Eye — the enormous, slow, glass-capsuled wheel turning over the river in front of you. And almost nobody visiting it knows this: for twenty-four years, it was standing here illegally. Not illegally exactly — technically.
The Mall & Admiralty Arch
You're at Admiralty Arch, the grand stone gateway where the long straight road to Buckingham Palace begins. Big ceremonial arch, built as a memorial to Queen Victoria.
The Millennium Bridge
That low, flat, silver footbridge across the river — the one that looks like a thin blade laid over the water, pointing straight at the dome of Saint Paul's — is the Millennium Bridge.
The Old Royal Naval College & the Painted Hall
Look at these two enormous matching buildings with the two matching domes, facing each other across a wide gap.
The OXO Tower
Look up at that square tower with the windows arranged in three vertical rows on every side. Those windows are not decoration. Read them. Circle, cross, circle. On all four faces of the building.
The Prime Meridian
This is it. The line. That brass strip running across the courtyard is the Prime Meridian — zero degrees longitude — and it is the single most agreed-upon line on the surface of the Earth.
The Queen's House & the Tulip Stairs
This is the Queen's House — the very view Wren had to split a palace in half to protect. It looks calm and plain, almost modern. And that plainness is exactly why it's one of the most important buildings in England.
The Royal Exchange & Bank
This is Bank junction — the exact centre of the money. Seven roads meet here, and the grand building with the columns and the triangular roof is the Royal Exchange, where for centuries the merchants of London came to shout at each other…
The Royal London Hospital & Joseph Merrick
This is the Royal London Hospital. And in the eighteen eighties, directly across this road — you could throw a stone to it — there was a penny shop where crowds paid to file past a man billed as half-human, half-elephant, and recoil.
The Royal Observatory — Harrison's Clocks
You've reached the Observatory, and inside it are four clocks that represent one of the great underdog victories in the history of anything.
The Shard
The Shard — the tallest building in Western Europe, tapering up into a glass point above you — wasn't even supposed to be called that.
The Underground — the First Subway on Earth
If a train rumbles past under your feet while you're standing here, that's the point. There's a railway directly beneath this pavement, and it's part of the oldest underground railway system in the world.
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
This modest building on Whitechapel Road, with a front doorway cut in the curved outline of a bell, was the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.
Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge. The two great towers, the blue walkways up top, the road that splits in the middle and lifts. It looks ancient. Gothic, medieval, like it's guarded knights. And that is a complete costume.
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Square. Nelson on his column, four bronze lions, fountains, pigeons. Looks like the front garden of the British Empire. It used to be a swamp full of hippos. Real ones.
Victoria Embankment & the Great Stink
This wide riverside road and the gardens beside it are the Victoria Embankment, and none of this land is natural. It's built on top of the river.
Westminster Abbey
That's Westminster Abbey. Every English and British monarch since ten sixty-six has been crowned in that building — forty of them, right up to King Charles a couple of years ago.
Whitehall & Banqueting House
That elegant white stone building on Whitehall is the Banqueting House. It looks like one nice building on a street of nice buildings. It is actually a survivor — the last standing piece of the biggest palace in Europe.
London Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Greenwich
The place where the whole planet agreed what time it is. A racing ship named after a witch's nightie, nearly destroyed by a vacuum cleaner. A palace Wren sliced in half so a queen could keep her view. A self-taught carpenter who beat Britain's top scientists — who cheated to stop him. And an anarchist who tried to bomb time itself and only blew up his own hand. Time, longitude and the Prime Meridian — with a few details the Bad Historian invented.
How London Was Built
Every toilet in London still flushes through Victorian sewers built by a man who doubled the pipe size on a hunch — whose great-great-grandson gave Britain Big Brother. The Tube map is a beautiful, deliberate lie copied all over the world. You can ride a train through an 1843 tunnel dug by copying a shipworm. And the old London Bridge is baking in the Arizona desert. The hidden engineering that holds the city up — plus a few details the Bad Historian invented.
St Paul's & the Great Fire of London
In 1666 this whole city burned to the ground in four days — and they hanged a man for it who wasn't even in the country when it started. A golden grasshopper has survived being burned down twice. A goose dodged the slaughterhouse for 38 years and got a funeral. And a cathedral rebuilt by an astronomer refused to fall during the Blitz while everything around it burned. How London burned and rose again — plus a few details the Bad Historian invented.
The East End & Whitechapel
One building here was a French church, then a synagogue, then a mosque — the same walls handed down through wave after wave of refugees. Big Ben and the American Liberty Bell were cast in the same tiny Whitechapel yard. The 'Elephant Man' built a paper cathedral with one hand. And the most feared gangster in London shot a man dead in a pub, steps from where the Salvation Army was born. The real East End — refugees, rebels, and the Kray twins — with a few details the Bad Historian invented.
The South Bank
The rowdy south shore London kept its theatres, brothels, and prisons on — now a power station full of art, a wheel that was 'temporary' for twenty-four years, a warship the government tried to scrap, and the tallest tower in Western Europe. Shakespeare's Globe, Tate Modern, Borough Market, HMS Belfast, and a few details the Bad Historian invented.
Westminster & Big Ben
Big Ben is a cracked bell they never fixed. There's a spot near Parliament where a toilet was secretly a phone to the President of the United States. Real hippos are buried under Trafalgar Square. And a teenager once broke into Buckingham Palace to steal the royal underwear. Seven of the most photographed places in Britain, and the parts the guidebooks leave out — with a few small details the Bad Historian invented, revealed at the end.
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