London Attractions

From the river, it still looks faintly improbable: a bicycle wheel the height of a 44-storey building, turning so slowly that London seems to slide past rather ...

Behind that famous balcony, the palace is stranger and more theatrical than most people expect: Chinese-themed rooms in the East Wing, a 47-metre Picture Galler...

Despite the branding, the first surprise is geographical: you arrive in Leavesden, on a former wartime aircraft site that later housed all eight Harry Potter fi...

From the Long Walk, the place has the blunt confidence of a fortress and the odd intimacy of a house that never stopped being used. You pass through wards built...

The dome still does what Wren intended: it drags your eyes upward from Ludgate Hill, then wrong-foots you inside with a church that feels lighter, brighter and ...

The first thing that catches you is not colour but scale: a Victorian glass ship moored in west London, palms pressing at the ribs, then a pagoda rising beyond ...

An inlaid floor of porphyry, onyx and glass sits under the crossing like something half Byzantine, half board game, and kings still stand on it to be crowned. T...

Animal noise arrives in fragments here: gibbon calls over Regent’s Canal, children flattening against glass, then the odd elegance of Decimus Burton’s 1828 cloc...

A court scandal in paint greets you before any throne room does: on William Kent’s King’s Staircase, 45 figures from George I’s household loiter, gossip and sta...

Smoke, brick and Baroque gilt sit oddly well together here. You arrive through Wolsey’s red-brick courts, then suddenly hit Henry VIII at full volume: the hamme...

Few places in London let you stand with one foot in the eastern hemisphere and the other in the west, then duck inside a 17th-century astronomer’s house to find...

Glass, cloud and railway grime meet in a way that should not work and absolutely does. The View from The Shard is at its best on Level 72, where the glazing fal...

That river-facing gap between the twin domes is not decorative politeness but a royal instruction. When Christopher Wren designed the Royal Hospital for Seamen ...

Stone, water and theatrical excess collide the moment you cross the bridge: peacocks drifting through Robert Marnock’s garden, the River Avon tucked below the w...

The best bit comes halfway across, when a red bus looks toy-sized beneath your shoes and the Thames traffic slides under a sheet of glass. The exhibition turns ...