Two Thousand Years Along the Thames: The Monuments of London and Their Stories

London is not one city but many. It is Londinium, the Roman trading post established on the north bank of the Thames in 43 AD, its street plan still visible in the City’s ancient lanes. It is the Norman fortress that William the Conqueror raised in 1066 to remind his new subjects who was in charge. It is the medieval city that burned in 1666 and rose again, rebuilt by Christopher Wren with a cathedral dome that would define the skyline for three centuries. It is the Victorian imperial capital that gave the world its model of the modern city — its museums, its bridges, its parliamentary palace, its sense that architecture could express the ambitions of a civilization. And it is the 21st-century global metropolis that added its own punctuation marks — the Gherkin, the Shard, the Walkie-Talkie — to a skyline already dense with history.

Every monument on the cover of this journal is a chapter in that story.

Tower Bridge: The Gateway to London

Tower Bridge is the most recognizable structure in London — the image that appears on a million postcards, the silhouette that says “London” to the world. But it is also, by the standards of the city’s monuments, relatively young: it was completed in 1894, designed by the engineer John Wolfe Barry and the architect Horace Jones in a Gothic Revival style intended to complement the medieval Tower of London beside it.

The engineering achievement was extraordinary. The bridge needed to open to allow tall ships to pass through to the Pool of London — the stretch of river that was then the busiest port in the world. The solution was a bascule bridge: two massive counterweighted leaves that could be raised in approximately one minute to allow ships to pass. The hydraulic machinery that powered the original bridge — driven by steam engines and accumulators — was a marvel of Victorian engineering, and it remained in use until 1976, when it was replaced by electric motors.

The twin towers that give the bridge its distinctive silhouette are not merely decorative: they house the walkways that connected the two sides of the bridge when the bascules were raised, and they contain the machinery rooms and the staircases that allowed pedestrians to cross at high level. Today they house the Tower Bridge Exhibition, which tells the story of the bridge’s construction and operation.

Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster: The Architecture of Democracy

The clock tower that everyone calls Big Ben — though strictly speaking, Big Ben is the name of the great bell inside the tower, not the tower itself, which was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 — is the most photographed building in Britain. It stands at the north end of the Palace of Westminster, the seat of the British Parliament, and its chimes have marked the hours of British public life since 1859.

The Palace of Westminster is itself a monument to Victorian ambition. The medieval palace that had stood on the site since the 11th century burned down in 1834 — a fire caused, with magnificent irony, by the overheating of the furnaces used to burn the old wooden tally sticks that had served as the Treasury’s accounting system. The competition to design the replacement was won by Charles Barry, who proposed a Gothic Revival building that would express the antiquity and continuity of British parliamentary tradition. The detailed Gothic ornament was designed by Augustus Pugin, whose obsessive attention to medieval precedent produced one of the most elaborately decorated buildings in the world.

The result — completed in stages between 1840 and 1870 — is a building that manages to be simultaneously ancient and modern: its Gothic exterior evoking the medieval origins of Parliament, its interior organized around the functional requirements of a 19th-century democratic legislature.

St. Paul’s Cathedral: Wren’s Monument to Resilience

St. Paul’s Cathedral is Christopher Wren’s masterpiece and London’s most enduring symbol of resilience. The medieval cathedral that had stood on Ludgate Hill since the 7th century burned in the Great Fire of 1666 — the catastrophic blaze that destroyed 13,200 houses and 87 churches in four days. Wren was appointed to design the replacement, and the result — completed in 1710 after 35 years of construction — is one of the great buildings of European architecture.

The dome — 365 feet high, the second largest in the world after St. Peter’s in Rome — is Wren’s supreme achievement. It is actually three domes: an outer dome of lead-covered timber that creates the silhouette visible from across London; an inner dome of brick that creates the painted interior visible from the cathedral floor; and a hidden brick cone between them that carries the weight of the stone lantern at the top. The engineering ingenuity that allowed Wren to create this triple-shell structure — giving the building both the exterior profile he wanted and the interior proportions he needed — is one of the great achievements of 17th-century architecture.

During the Blitz of 1940–41, St. Paul’s became a symbol of London’s defiance. The photograph of the dome rising above the smoke of burning buildings — taken by Herbert Mason on the night of 29 December 1940 — became one of the defining images of the Second World War.

Westminster Abbey: A Thousand Years of Coronations

Westminster Abbey has been the coronation church of English and British monarchs since 1066, when William the Conqueror was crowned here on Christmas Day. Every monarch since — with the exceptions of Edward V and Edward VIII, who were never crowned — has been crowned in the Abbey, making it the site of an unbroken ceremonial tradition that stretches across a millennium.

The Abbey is also the burial place of many of Britain’s greatest figures: monarchs from Henry III to George II, poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Ted Hughes (in Poets’ Corner), scientists including Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, musicians, politicians, and soldiers. The density of history compressed into its Gothic interior — the medieval tombs, the Tudor monuments, the Baroque memorials, the 20th-century additions — makes it one of the most extraordinary buildings in the world.

Buckingham Palace: The House of the Monarch

Buckingham Palace has been the official London residence of the British monarch since 1837, when Queen Victoria moved in shortly after her accession. The building that stands today is largely the result of a series of 19th and early 20th-century renovations — the original Buckingham House, built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703, was transformed by John Nash for George IV in the 1820s, and the familiar east front facing the Mall was added in 1913.

The Changing of the Guard — the ceremonial handover of responsibility for guarding the palace between the Old Guard and the New Guard — has been one of London’s most popular tourist attractions since the 19th century. The ceremony, performed by soldiers of the Household Division in their distinctive red tunics and bearskin hats, takes place in the palace forecourt and on the surrounding streets, and it remains one of the most visible expressions of the British monarchy’s ceremonial tradition.

The Gherkin: London’s 21st-Century Landmark

30 St Mary Axe — universally known as the Gherkin — was completed in 2003 and immediately became one of the most recognizable buildings in London. Designed by Norman Foster and Partners, its distinctive bullet-shaped profile and diamond-patterned glass skin represent a deliberate departure from the rectangular glass towers that had dominated commercial architecture for decades.

The building’s shape is not merely aesthetic: the tapering profile reduces wind turbulence at street level, and the spiraling atria that wind up through the building create a natural ventilation system that reduces energy consumption. The Gherkin was one of the first major commercial buildings in London to take environmental performance seriously as a design criterion, and it remains a landmark of sustainable architecture as well as a visual icon.

Our London Journal carries the Thames landmarks collage on the front and back covers — Tower Bridge, Big Ben, St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, and the Gherkin, two thousand years of London history in a journal you can carry through the city itself.

References

• Bradley, Simon & Nikolaus Pevsner. The Buildings of England: London. Yale University Press, 2002–2005.
• Hibbert, Christopher. London: The Biography of a City. Penguin, 1980.
• Tames, Richard. A Traveller’s History of London. Interlink, 2006.
• Wren Society. The Wren Society Publications. Oxford University Press, 1924–1943.