Interesting facts about London: history, places and city legends

Katerina Galkina · EN · 04/10/2026

London's streets contain more than postcard landmarks: Roman remains, buried rivers, bridges, parks and pubs preserve different layers of the city. This complete collection contains 260 thematic facts, with folklore identified as folklore.

London's layers: a short timeline

• Around AD 47–50 — Roman Londinium develops as a Thames trading settlement; its wall, amphitheatre and Mithraic temple leave visible traces.

• Early Middle Ages — Saxon Lundenwic grows west of the Roman walls; the fortified City later becomes an urban centre again.

• 1666 — the Great Fire transforms the City; rebuilding gives London Wren's cathedral and churches.

• 1858 — the Great Stink accelerates new sewers and embankments.

• 1863 — the first Underground line opens.

• 1952 — the Great Smog becomes a turning point in efforts to clean London's air.

• Today — markets, museums, parks and neighbourhoods make these layers accessible on a walk.

Roman and ancient London

• The Romans founded London as Londinium around AD 47–50.

• The precise origin of the name London remains disputed; there is no single accepted explanation.

• Remains of the Roman city wall are visible at Tower Hill and London Wall, near the former Museum of London building.

• The Roman Temple of Mithras, discovered in 1954, is displayed beneath Bloomberg's headquarters in the City.

• A Roman amphitheatre was discovered beneath Guildhall in 1988; its outline is marked in the square above.

• London Stone on Cannon Street is an old limestone block whose original purpose is unknown. It has attracted numerous legends. London Museum — London Stone ↗.

• Roman Londinium was a trading port on the Thames, with a bridge close to the present London Bridge crossing.

• After Roman government ended in the fifth century, the walled city was largely abandoned for a time.

• Saxon Lundenwic developed further west, around present-day Aldwych and Covent Garden.

• Aldwych derives from an Old English name for the old settlement, recalling the trading community of Lundenwic.

Medieval London

• The historic City of London, nicknamed the Square Mile, covers approximately 1.12 square miles.

• The City's motto is Domine dirige nos: “Lord, direct us.”

• Heraldic dragon statues carrying the City's coat of arms mark its boundaries. Calling them griffins is inaccurate.

• Temple Bar was an old gateway to the City; the surviving stone gate was moved and re-erected beside Paternoster Square.

• All Hallows by the Tower traces its foundation to about AD 675 and is regarded as the City's oldest church.

• A Roman pavement survives in the crypt of All Hallows.

• St Bartholomew the Great, founded in 1123, is among London's oldest surviving church buildings.

• The Knights Templar built the round Temple Church with reference to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

• Smithfield was a livestock market for centuries and also a place of public executions.

• William Wallace was executed at Smithfield in 1305. In 1381, the Peasants' Revolt leader Wat Tyler was stabbed there and subsequently executed.

• The Tower of London's royal menagerie housed exotic animals for centuries, including lions and a polar bear.

• The polar bear was allowed to fish in the Thames while tethered by a long chain.

Fire, plague, the Great Stink and smog

• The Monument to the Great Fire is 202 feet high; its height matches the distance to the site where the fire began. The Monument — History ↗.

• The Great Fire of 1666 started in a bakery on Pudding Lane.

• A spiral staircase of 311 steps leads to the Monument's viewing platform.

• After the fire, Christopher Wren rebuilt dozens of City churches as well as St Paul's Cathedral.

• Wren's epitaph at St Paul's invites visitors seeking his monument to look around them.

• During the Great Stink of 1858, the smell of the polluted Thames reached Parliament and accelerated funding for a new sewer system.

• Joseph Bazalgette designed London's Victorian interceptor sewers. Their structures remain in use, although the network has been expanded and modernised.

• The new embankments reclaimed strips of land from the Thames and accommodated sewers and, on the Victoria Embankment, the Underground.

• The Great Smog of 1952 caused thousands of deaths during and after several days of extreme air pollution.

• The Clean Air Act of 1956 followed the disaster.

• London's polluted “pea-souper” fogs helped create the familiar misty city of crime fiction and film.

The Thames and its bridges

• Dozens of road, railway and pedestrian bridges cross the Thames within Greater London. The exact total depends on the boundaries and crossings counted.

• In some particularly cold winters, the Thames froze firmly enough for Frost Fairs to take place on its surface.

• The last major Thames Frost Fair was held in 1814.

• The piers of old London Bridge restricted the river's flow, helping ice to accumulate.

• Tower Bridge is a bascule bridge: its two lifting spans rise hundreds of times a year to let vessels through.

• On 30 December 1952, Albert Gunter drove a double-decker bus from Tower Bridge's rising span onto the other half, which had not yet moved. The incident is real, although “jump” makes the drop between the spans sound more theatrical. Tower Bridge — The day a bus jumped over Tower Bridge ↗.

• Glass floors in Tower Bridge's high-level walkways let visitors look down at the river and road below.

• The Millennium Bridge swayed after opening in 2000 and acquired the nickname “the wobbly bridge.”

• It was closed for modifications and reopened almost two years later.

• Waterloo Bridge is nicknamed the Ladies' Bridge because women contributed substantially to its wartime construction.

• The railway bridge at Blackfriars carries a roof covered with solar panels, creating a striking example of solar-powered transport infrastructure.

• The Thames is tidal in central London, with roughly two high and two low tides each day.

• Seals visit the Thames; in 2006, a whale famously swam upstream into central London.

• The Thames Barrier became operational in 1982 and was officially opened in 1984. It protects London from tidal surges and combinations of high river flow and high tides.

• Buried rivers including the Fleet, Tyburn, Walbrook and Effra now run through culverts or drainage systems beneath the city.

• The River Fleet gave its name to Fleet Street, historically associated with the British press.

The Underground

• The Underground's roundel, a circle crossed by a bar, first appeared in an early form around 1908.

• Edward Johnston designed a distinctive lettering style for London's transport signs.

• Angel has the longest escalator on the London Underground.

• Hampstead has the deepest platforms on the Underground.

• The Circle line no longer runs simply around a closed circle: an extension gives its route a more spiral-like shape.

• “Mind the gap” has been part of Underground travel since the late 1960s.

• The Underground's first escalators opened at Earl's Court in 1911. The story of a man with a wooden leg hired specifically to reassure passengers is usually retold as transport folklore.

• Aldgate is associated with a popular story about a station built over a plague pit. Without precise archaeological confirmation, it is better treated as an urban tale than an established fact about the station site.

• The network has disused “ghost stations,” including Aldwych and Down Street.

• Winston Churchill used Down Street as a wartime refuge.

• Culex pipiens molestus, known as the London Underground mosquito, occurs in subterranean structures. A genomic study published in 2025 found that its adaptation to people began much earlier in the Mediterranean or Middle East, rather than arising from scratch in London's tunnels. Princeton University — Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito ↗.

• Mail Rail carried bags of post between sorting offices beneath London. Visitors can now ride along part of its route at the Postal Museum.

• The usual escalator convention is to stand on the right and walk on the left.

• Underground stations served as air-raid shelters during the Blitz.

• The Waterloo & City line, nicknamed the Drain, has only two stations and links Waterloo with the City.

• The first deep-level Tube railway opened in 1890 as the City & South London Railway.

Buses, taxis and transport

• For the Knowledge test, black-cab drivers study approximately 25,000 streets and thousands of destinations in central London.

• Preparing for the Knowledge can take three to four years.

• London taxi design requirements include a tight turning circle, allowing a cab to turn in a small space.

• Traffic keeps right on the private Savoy Court approach to the Savoy hotel. The claim that this is Britain's only example is too sweeping.

• Savoy Court's unusual arrangement relates to access and passenger drop-offs for the hotel and neighbouring theatre; it is a local feature of the courtyard.

• Oyster travel cards were introduced in 2003.

• Central London's congestion charge also began in 2003.

• Docklands Light Railway trains run automatically without a conventional driver.

• A cable car crosses the Thames near Greenwich and the Royal Docks.

• London's hire bikes were widely nicknamed “Boris bikes” after their launch during Boris Johnson's mayoralty.

• London postal districts use directional codes such as E, N, SE, SW and W.

Landmarks and monuments

• Distances to London are conventionally measured from Charing Cross.

• The statue of Charles I near Charing Cross marks the traditional reference point for central London.

• Cleopatra's Needle was made in Egypt around the fifteenth century BC, more than a thousand years before Cleopatra VII ruled.

• A Victorian time capsule containing newspapers, photographs and everyday objects was placed beneath Cleopatra's Needle.

• The bronze sphinxes beside Cleopatra's Needle face towards the obelisk. The story that they were installed “by mistake” is usually told as a local curiosity without firm evidence of the intended arrangement.

• The winged figure at Piccadilly Circus represents Anteros, although it is commonly called Eros.

• Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square is approximately 52 metres tall.

• Feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square is prohibited.

• Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth hosts changing contemporary artworks.

• A tiny former police observation box in Trafalgar Square is often called “the smallest police station.” That is a tourist nickname rather than its official status as a fully functioning station.

• The Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens is an elaborate example of Victorian Gothic design.

• The Royal Albert Hall hosts the summer BBC Proms concerts.

• Suspended acoustic diffusers, commonly called mushrooms, help control the Royal Albert Hall's sound.

• The London Eye opened to the public in 2000 and was then Europe's tallest observation wheel.

• Elizabeth Tower, commonly called Big Ben, has a small measured lean. Strictly speaking, Big Ben is the great hour bell inside it.

• The clock's familiar tune is known as the Westminster chimes.

Buildings and skyscrapers

• The Shard rises approximately 310 metres and remains one of Britain's most recognisable high-rise landmarks.

• The Gherkin's official address is 30 St Mary Axe.

• The Gherkin occupies the former Baltic Exchange site, badly damaged by a bombing in 1992; surviving historic elements were subsequently removed from the site.

• The concave façade of 20 Fenchurch Street, nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie, once concentrated sunlight strongly enough to damage parts of a parked car.

• The Walkie-Talkie's upper floors contain the publicly accessible Sky Garden.

• The sloping profile of the Leadenhall Building, nicknamed the Cheesegrater, takes protected views of St Paul's dome into account.

• The Lloyd's building has services and lifts on the outside, producing its famous “inside-out” appearance.

• Lloyd's keeps the Lutine Bell, historically rung when news arrived about ships.

• The Bank of England is nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

• A mulberry tree grows in the Bank's courtyard, while gold vaults lie beneath the building.

• The Brutalist Barbican complex was built in an area devastated by wartime bombing.

• An inflatable pig above Battersea Power Station during Pink Floyd's 1976 photo shoot helped make the building a pop-culture landmark.

• BT Tower was originally the Post Office Tower, rather than a BBC tower. Its telecommunications role was long associated with official secrecy; claims that it appeared on no maps whatsoever should not be taken literally.

• Regular BBC television broadcasts in what counted as high definition at the time began at Alexandra Palace, or Ally Pally, in 1936.

Parks and wildlife

• London Zoo, founded in 1828, is regarded as the world's oldest scientific zoo.

• London Zoo helped popularise zoo as a shortened form of zoological garden.

• Pelicans have been kept in St James's Park since 1664, when a Russian ambassador presented them as a gift.

• Richmond Park is the largest Royal Park, with free-roaming deer.

• Hampton Court's hedge maze was planted in the late seventeenth century and is described as Britain's oldest surviving hedge maze.

• The Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens was installed overnight in 1912.

• The London plane is a characteristic city tree, valued for its ability to cope with polluted urban conditions.

• Feral ring-necked parakeets have established themselves in London's parks.

• Foxes are familiar neighbours in residential London.

• Outdoor swimming takes place in Hampstead Heath's ponds throughout the year.

• Primrose Hill and Parliament Hill offer extensive views across London.

• The Tower's moat has long been dry; vegetables were grown there during wartime.

Museums and galleries

• Profits from the Great Exhibition of 1851 helped establish South Kensington's cultural district, where the V&A, Science Museum and Natural History Museum developed.

• The exhibition's Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham and burned down in 1936.

• For decades, Dippy the Diplodocus greeted visitors in the Natural History Museum's main hall.

• A blue-whale skeleton named Hope now hangs in that hall.

• The V&A is among the world's largest museums of art, design and decorative craftsmanship.

• Tate Modern occupies the former Bankside Power Station.

• Sir John Soane's Museum preserves the architect's personal collection in a maze of rooms.

• The Wallace Collection began as a private art collection, was left to the nation and offers free entry to its permanent collection.

• An operating theatre dating from 1822 survives in the attic of the former St Thomas's Church near London Bridge, making it one of Europe's oldest surviving surgical theatres.

• Madame Tussaud displayed wax figures in London from the early nineteenth century; her permanent London exhibition opened in 1835.

Theatre and the West End

• Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap opened in London in 1952 and became the world's longest-running play. Its run needs a qualification: performances stopped during the pandemic.

• The Theatre Royal Drury Lane site has hosted theatre since 1663; today's building dates from the nineteenth century. It is one of London's oldest theatre sites and is also famous for ghost stories.

• The reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe opened in 1997 close to the original theatre's site.

• Actor Sam Wanamaker's persistence was central to the Globe's reconstruction.

• St Paul's Church in Covent Garden is known as the Actors' Church.

• In 1662, Samuel Pepys recorded seeing a puppet show in Covent Garden, an early documented appearance of the English Punch and Judy tradition.

• Covent Garden street performers operate under permissions and organised arrangements for performance pitches.

• Leicester Square is a traditional setting for film premieres.

Districts and neighbourhoods

• Greater London comprises 32 boroughs and the separate City of London.

• More than 300 languages have been recorded among London's residents.

• Notting Hill Carnival is one of Europe's largest street festivals and developed from London's Caribbean culture.

• Soho has a long association with nightlife, music and film companies.

• Carnaby Street became a showcase for Swinging Sixties fashion.

• Denmark Street, Britain's Tin Pan Alley, has been associated with music publishers, studios and instrument shops principally since the twentieth century.

• Abbey Road's zebra crossing became famous through the Beatles' 1969 album cover.

• The Beatles gave their final live performance on the roof of 3 Savile Row in 1969.

• Savile Row is internationally associated with bespoke tailoring.

• Liberty's Tudor-style building incorporated timber from old naval ships.

• Harrods once sold the lion cub Christian, whose later reunion with his former owners became widely known.

• The Royal Hospital Chelsea's veterans, the Chelsea Pensioners, are recognised by their scarlet coats.

• Shoreditch and Hoxton became associated with London's creative and “hipster” scene.

• Bloomsbury is linked with the Bloomsbury Group and the British Museum.

• Greenwich preserves Cutty Sark, the last surviving tea clipper.

• At Greenwich's historic Prime Meridian line, visitors can stand on either side of the conventional boundary between hemispheres. The modern reference meridian used by satellite navigation lies slightly further east.

• The Painted Hall at Greenwich's Old Royal Naval College is often nicknamed Britain's Sistine Chapel.

• Spitalfields retains evidence of the Huguenot silk weavers who fled France.

• Brick Lane brings together curry restaurants, Jewish bagel shops and a Sunday market.

Markets

• Borough Market is one of London's oldest food markets.

• Leadenhall Market and Bull's Head Passage provided the Leaky Cauldron entrance and approach to Diagon Alley in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001).

• Columbia Road's flower market is held on Sundays.

• Portobello Road in Notting Hill is known for antiques.

• Camden's markets grew from small craft stalls into a large network of shops and trading spaces.

• Smithfield and Billingsgate are the historic names of London's meat and fish markets. Their premises and relocation plans change, so a market's history should be distinguished from its current trading address.

• Petticoat Lane is a longstanding East End clothing market.

Pubs, food and drink

• Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street was rebuilt in 1667 after the Great Fire. It is associated with literary London and Samuel Johnson, although stories about famous regulars are not always documented.

• The riverside Prospect of Whitby claims a history dating to 1520 and the title of London's oldest riverside pub.

• The George Inn near London Bridge is London's surviving galleried coaching inn and belongs to the National Trust.

• Ye Olde Mitre stands on land historically associated with the bishops of Ely. Stories that it was a “piece of Cambridgeshire” in London simplify old ecclesiastical rights rather than describe a present geographical boundary.

• Samuel Johnson compiled his famous dictionary while living in Gough Square.

• Johnson is remembered for observing that being tired of London meant being tired of life.

• Pearly Kings and Queens wear suits covered with mother-of-pearl buttons and raise money for charity.

• The pearly tradition grew out of the culture of London's costermongers, or street traders.

Royal and governmental London

• The Tower's evening Ceremony of the Keys dates to the fourteenth century. Claims that it has never been interrupted are inaccurate: Historic Royal Palaces records a cancellation on 29 December 1940 because of the Blitz. Historic Royal Palaces — The Ceremony of the Keys ↗.

• Anne Boleyn and other people of royal rank were executed at the Tower.

• Traitors' Gate is a water entrance through which prisoners were brought into the Tower.

• Hampton Court is associated with Henry VIII and with stories of Catherine Howard's ghost.

• Hampton Court has a historic real-tennis court, preserving the game that preceded modern lawn tennis.

• Kensington Palace has housed members of the royal family for centuries.

• Downing Street's cat holds the playful official title Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.

• The famous black door of 10 Downing Street has no external handle or keyhole and is opened from inside.

• The zero in the door's number 10 is set at a distinctive angle.

• The underground Cabinet War Rooms beneath Whitehall preserve the wartime government's working spaces.

Ghosts and legends

• A legend places Boudicca's grave beneath King's Cross platforms. There is no archaeological evidence for it, and her actual burial place is unknown.

• Drury Lane is associated with the theatrical ghost story of the Man in Grey.

• The Tower is often described in folklore as one of Britain's most haunted places.

• Cleopatra's Needle attracts stories about curses and misfortune. These belong to folklore, rather than being established properties of the monument.

• London Stone has been given the role of the city's protective talisman in legend.

• Disused Tube stations have inspired many stories of ghosts and unexplained sounds.

Cockney and language

• Cockney rhyming slang substitutes phrases by rhyme: dog and bone means phone.

• Plates of meat means feet, while apples and pears means stairs.

• Trouble and strife is a traditional jokey rhyming-slang term for wife.

• Porkies, shortened from pork pies, means lies.

• Multicultural London English has developed among London's younger generations.

London's darker history

• The old Clink prison is recalled by the expression “in the clink,” meaning imprisoned.

• The Marshalsea debtors' prison is remembered partly because Charles Dickens's father was held there.

• Bethlem Hospital, known as Bedlam, gave English the word bedlam for chaos or uproar.

• The figure of Justice above the Old Bailey has no blindfold.

• Tyburn's gallows stood near today's Marble Arch; executions there ended in 1783.

• The London Necropolis Railway carried the dead and mourners to the large cemetery at Brookwood.

• Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

• Bunhill Fields contains the graves of William Blake, John Bunyan and Daniel Defoe.

• Postman's Park contains a memorial to ordinary people who died while saving others.

Sport

• London hosted the Summer Olympics in 1908, 1948 and 2012.

• The 1908 Olympic marathon in London covered 42.195 kilometres. That distance became the international standard later, in 1921. World Athletics — Marathon ↗.

• The 1908 route linked Windsor Castle with White City Stadium and a finish by the royal box; the chosen course produced the future standard of 26 miles 385 yards.

• Wembley Stadium is recognised by its enormous arch.

• The old Wembley stadium with its twin towers was demolished in 2003.

• Lord's is known as the Home of Cricket.

• Lord's playing field has a noticeable slope, with approximately two and a half metres' difference between opposite sides.

• Twickenham is the traditional home of English rugby union.

• Wimbledon is a district in south-west London and the setting for the famous tennis championships.

• The London Marathon is one of the world's major mass-participation races.

• The Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race follows the Thames from Putney to Mortlake.

Churches and sacred places

• The round Temple Church is associated with the Knights Templar and has gained further fame through popular fiction.

• Southwark Cathedral stands near London Bridge and preserves links with the Elizabethan theatre district.

• The Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, distinct from Westminster Abbey, is a red-brick building in a neo-Byzantine style.

• St Stephen Walbrook's dome shows Wren developing ideas for a central domed space alongside his work on St Paul's. The church is often described as a rehearsal for the cathedral.

Curiosities, records and everyday details

• London has more than one historic centre: the City and Westminster were distinct nuclei of the growing metropolis.

• The classic British Monopoly board uses real London place names.

• Old Kent Road is its cheapest property square and Mayfair its most expensive.

• King's Cross has a Platform 9¾ photo spot for Harry Potter fans.

• St Pancras combines a Gothic Revival station and hotel with an international Eurostar terminal.

• Waterloo is a major London terminus with many platforms; passenger totals and rankings change from year to year.

• Clapham Junction is an exceptionally busy railway interchange used by numerous suburban and longer-distance trains.

• Paddington Bear was named after the London station.

• The Gherkin, Shard and Walkie-Talkie illustrate London's enthusiasm for skyscraper nicknames.

• Bazalgette's Victorian sewer structures remain part of London's drainage network more than a century and a half later.

• The Victoria, Albert and Chelsea embankments provided space for interceptor sewers and reclaimed riverside land; the Underground runs beneath the Victoria Embankment.

• Gas lamps survive in London. Specialist lamplighters maintain them, although many switch on through timers rather than daily hand-lighting.

• The City's annual Lord Mayor's Show is a longstanding civic procession.

• The City has its own Lord Mayor and police force, separate from those serving the rest of London.

• The City's livery companies developed from medieval trade guilds.

• Some livery companies maintain old ceremonial rights and take part in civic processions.

• London's regular bus history reaches back to George Shillibeer's omnibus service in 1829; claims to the world's oldest transport service depend on the definition used.

• Many red postboxes carry the royal cypher of the monarch reigning when they were installed.

• Many London squares began with private gardens for residents of the surrounding houses.

• Some residential garden squares remain private, with access for nearby owners or residents and occasionally visitors on special open-garden days.

• Seven Dials brings seven streets together around a sundial column in Covent Garden.

• Nearby Neal's Yard is a small courtyard known for its colourful buildings.

• Piccadilly Circus is famous for its illuminated advertising screens.

• Covent Garden housed London's main fruit and vegetable market until the 1970s.

• The Royal Opera House stands beside Covent Garden.

• Canary Wharf developed on former Isle of Dogs docks into a major business district.

• The origin of the name Isle of Dogs is disputed, with several competing explanations.

• The West India Docks chiefly served trade with the Caribbean and formed part of the British Empire's port economy.

• Greenwich's time ball drops at 13:00 local time: GMT in winter and BST in summer. Historically, sailors used it to set their shipboard chronometers. Royal Museums Greenwich — The Greenwich Time Ball ↗.

• The Royal Observatory at Greenwich was founded in 1675 to support navigation.

• Regular BBC television broadcasts in the high-definition standard of the day began at Alexandra Palace in 1936.

• The O2 developed from the Millennium Dome, which opened in 2000.

• Dr Johnson's House in Gough Square preserves an eighteenth-century writer's home and the history of his dictionary.

• London cab drivers still use the green shelters established from the nineteenth century as places for food and rest.

• In 2024, Historic England recorded 13 surviving cabmen's shelters and announced that all had been given listed status. Historic England — 13th Cabmen’s Shelter Listed ↗.

• The Tower has served as a fortress, palace, prison, mint, observatory and menagerie.

• Fleet Street remains a shorthand for the British press even though major newspaper offices have moved away.

• Harley Street is associated with private medicine and specialist doctors.

• Angel and Elephant and Castle took their names from inns. Seven Sisters is linked with seven trees rather than an old pub.

• Elephant and Castle derives from an inn sign rather than an actual local population of elephants.

• Many London mews were originally stables and service buildings before being converted into housing.

• Cockfosters and Shepherd's Bush recall London's rural past; Barbican refers to a defensive fortification.

• Strand means shore, recalling the street's former position beside the Thames.

• Stone lions decorate many London bridges and buildings as symbols of strength and royal authority.

• London has so many museums, parks and freely accessible sights that exploring the whole city is a continuing project rather than a single trip.

Mini quiz

Which belongs to London: the Underground mosquito, the Ladies' Bridge or London Stone?

Answer: all three. The mosquito occurs underground but originated much earlier outside London. Waterloo is called the Ladies' Bridge because of women's contribution to its construction. London Stone is a real historic object whose original purpose is unknown.