London travel guide

Top 10 sights in London

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Ham · CC BY-SA 3.0

   British Museum

   Eight million objects, the largest museum collection in the world, and free to enter since it opened in 1759. The Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon sculptures are here, and so is the argument about where several thousand of the objects should be; Foster's glass roof over the Great Court went up in 2000.

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2. 

   2© Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Buckingham Palace

   The monarch's London residence since Victoria moved in during 1837, with seven hundred and seventy-five rooms behind a facade that was refaced in 1913. The state rooms open in summer; the guard changes on a published timetable, not daily.

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3. 

   3© Σπάρτακος · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Westminster Abbey

   The church where every English coronation since 1066 has been held, rebuilt in French Gothic by Henry III from 1245. More than three thousand people are buried or commemorated inside, Newton and Darwin among them, with the writers gathered in one corner.

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4. 

   4© Bob Collowan · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Tower of London

   A fortress begun by William the Conqueror about 1078 to hold London down, which it did as palace, prison and mint for nine centuries. It guards the crown jewels, keeps ravens by tradition, and is explained by warders who live inside the walls.

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5. 

   5© DS Pugh · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Big Ben

   Properly the name of the bell — nearly fourteen tonnes, hung in 1859 and cracked within a year, which is why it sounds as it does. The tower was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 and came out of a five-year restoration in 2022.

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6. 

   6© Khamtran · CC BY-SA 3.0

   London Eye

   An observation wheel a hundred and thirty-five metres high, put up for the millennium and never taken down. Its thirty-two sealed capsules take half an hour to come round; on a clear day the view reaches forty kilometres.

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7. 

   7© Mark Fosh · CC BY 2.0

   St Paul's Cathedral

   Christopher Wren's cathedral, built between 1675 and 1710 to replace the one lost in the Great Fire. Its dome rises a hundred and eleven metres, the Whispering Gallery carries a murmur around the inside, and the survival of the dome in the Blitz became a national image.

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8. 

   8© Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Trafalgar Square

   The square laid out in the 1830s around Nelson's Column, which is fifty-two metres to the top of the admiral's hat. The fourth plinth stood empty for a century and a half and now takes a new commissioned sculpture every couple of years.

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9. 

   9© Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Gallery

   Founded in 1824 when parliament bought a banker's pictures, and free ever since. Two thousand three hundred paintings run from Duccio to Cézanne; Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Turner's Fighting Temeraire and Velázquez's Rokeby Venus are the ones people arrive asking for.

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10. 

    10© Citizen59 · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Madame Tussauds

    A wax museum founded in London in 1835 by Marie Tussaud, who had learned the craft making death masks of the guillotined in Paris and toured Britain for decades with the results.

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1. 

   1

   The Crystal Palace

   A building of cast iron and plate glass raised in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, five hundred and sixty metres long and put up in months. It was moved to Sydenham afterwards and burned down in 1936.

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2. 

   2© Colin · CC BY-SA 4.0

   The Shard

   A pyramid of glass by Renzo Piano, three hundred and ten metres high and the tallest building in western Europe when it opened in 2012. The viewing floors near the top look down the Thames and across to Tower Bridge.

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3. 

   3© Steve Cadman from London, U.K. · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Kensington Palace

   A royal residence since William III bought it in 1689 for air cleaner than Whitehall's. Victoria was born and grew up here, and the state rooms now show court dress alongside the apartments where several royals still live.

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4. 

   4© Aurelien Guichard from London, United Kingdom · CC BY-SA 2.0

   30 St Mary Axe

   The tower Londoners call the Gherkin, finished by Norman Foster in 2004 on the site of the Baltic Exchange, wrecked by a bomb in 1992. Its shape lets wind past and light in; at a hundred and eighty metres it is not the tallest but is the most recognisable.

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5. 

   5© Steven Brown · CC BY-SA 2.0

   St James's Palace

   Henry VIII built it in the 1530s on the site of a leper hospital, and it remains the senior royal palace: foreign ambassadors are still accredited to the Court of St James's, and accessions are proclaimed from its balcony. It is a working royal office and is not open to visitors.

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6. 

   6© Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Victoria and Albert Museum

   The world's largest museum of design and the applied arts, founded in 1852 out of the profits of the Great Exhibition and holding some 2.8 million objects. Entry is free, the cast courts are full-size copies of things too large to move, and the courtyard café is the oldest in any museum.

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   7© Krzysztof Belczyński from Warsaw, POLAND · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Cutty Sark

   One of the last and fastest tea clippers, launched at Dumbarton in 1869 and named for the short-shirted witch in Burns's Tam o' Shanter. The Suez Canal took her trade within a few years, so she ran wool from Australia instead; she now sits in dry dock at Greenwich.

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8. 

   8© Ricardalovesmonuments · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Hampton Court Palace

   The palace Cardinal Wolsey built and handed to Henry VIII in 1529 in a failed attempt to keep his favour. The Tudor kitchens still fire, the maze has confused visitors since about 1700, and it stands nineteen kilometres up the Thames.

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9. 

   9© Fremantleboy 06 July 2007 · CC BY 2.5

   Londinium

   The Roman city founded on the Thames about AD 47 and burned by Boudica's army within fifteen years. It was rebuilt, walled around AD 200, and stretches of that wall still stand near Tower Hill and the Barbican.

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10. 

    10© Alvesgaspar · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Hyde Park

    A hundred and forty hectares taken by Henry VIII from Westminster Abbey in 1536 for hunting and opened to the public a century later. The Serpentine is swum in year-round by a hardy club, and Speakers' Corner has held forth since 1872.

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