In the 18th century the park was notorious for highwaymen and Horace Walpole was one of many robbed here. Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ was composed for an event here in 1749.
In January 1969 The Beatles played their last ever gig together on the roof of 3 Savile Row, the then offices of Apple Records. The police broke up the performance after receiving complaints.
The lion sculpture was once painted red and stood over the Red Lion Brewery on the South Bank in the 18th century. When the area was redeveloped in the 1950s the lion was saved and moved here.
This fascinating museum is located in an old Georgian sugar warehouse, and tells the 2,000 year story of London’s river, port and people. It also houses the archives of the Port of London Authority.
44 Berkeley Sq, designed by William Kent, has been described as the finest terrace house in London. It’s now home to the Clermont Club, where Lord Lucan was expected the night he disappeared.
The British Museum began from the collection of naturalist Sir Hans Sloane which he left to the nation on his death in 1753. Now it houses 7 million objects including more than 100 Egyptian mummies.
The Egyptian rock sculpture over the entrance to the famous auctioneers dates from 1600BC, making it the oldest known man-made object on the streets of London, just beating Cleopatra’s Needle.
Queen Elizabeth II was born in this London house on 21st April, 1926. It was the home of her maternal grandfather, the Earl of Strathmore.
1 Savile Row was the 19th century home of the Royal Geographical Society. Here in 1874 the body of explorer David Livingstone lay in state, a year after he died in Zambia.
This theatre was famous in the 1940s and 50s for hosting big American names like Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jnr, Judy Garland and Bing Crosby.
Marie Tussaud, born in Strasbourg in 1761, made her first wax figure of the great French philosopher Voltaire in 1777. She opened a museum in London in 1835.
Sculpted from Italian marble and based on the Arch of Constantine in Rome, this was built in 1827 as the entrance to Buckingham Palace. It was moved here in 1851 when the palace was enlarged.
This plinth was intended to hold a statue of King William IV on horseback but they ran out of money. It is now used for various modern art exhibits and experiments.
Cavendish House once stood at the Clapham Common end of Cavendish Road. Here the scientist Henry Cavendish (d.1810) calculated the mass of the earth (about 6 trillion tons).
Much of the collection was inherited from the Museum of Patents (est 1858) and includes early locomotives such as Stephenson’s Rocket and Puffing Billy, and the first jet engine.
The market began life in 1974 as a weekly crafts market, and now has about 100,000 visitors each weekend. The Stables Market is where the horses used to be kept for towing canal barges.
The hit 1937 song ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’ is from the musical ‘Me and My Girl’. The Times said ‘While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances – to the Lambeth Walk’.
The square here was laid out by Inigo Jones in 1630, on land once used by the monks of Westminster Abbey as a garden, but confiscated by Henry VIII during the Reformation.
The second bridge here was completed in 1945. Because there was a war on, much of the work was carried out by women and so this used to be known as ‘the ladies’ bridge’.
The US Embassy in Grosvenor Square was the focus of anti-Vietnam war demonstrations during the 1960s. The worst riots were in March 1968, leaving 80 injured and 200 under arrest.
This 18th century pub stands on the site of an earlier inn used by playwrights and actors of The Globe theatre. From here Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire of 1666 destroy the city on the far bank.
Soane was a distinguished neo-classical architect who designed the Bank of England. After his death in 1837 his house became a unique museum of architecture and art.
The main entrance to Waterloo Station is the Victory Arch, a memorial to employees of the London and South Western Railway staff killed in the First World War.
An inn was built here in the 15th century by the monks from Bermondsey Priory. It’s said the crew of the Mayflower were recruited here, and it’s from where Turner and Whistler drew the river.
This area gets its name from the fields of the hospital of St.Mary’s priory, founded in 1197 on the site of a Roman cemetery. It was demolished in the Reformation.
John Adams, the first American ambassador to Britain, lived in Grosvenor Square, and this is where the US embassy has been since 1938. It plans to relocate to Wandsworth by 2017.
This area was named after Leicester House, the London mansion home of the Earl of Leicester built in 1635. But by 1800 it was a home of popular entertainment and theatres, and has never looked back.
50 Berkeley Sq, once home of Prime Minister George Canning and now of antiquarian book dealers Maggs, was famous to Victorians as the most haunted house in London!
No hotel has greater royal connections than Claridge’s, which entertained Queen Victoria in 1860, and was where the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia was born in 1945. The current building dates from 1898.
