Notable places

Five markets under three owners, one of them now Transport for London's. The buildings are the railway's rather than Pickfords', the lock is properly Hampstead Road Lock and is a pair rather than a triple, the Electric Ballroom's demolition threat died in 2005, the Highline was cancelled in May 2026, and no reliable visitor count exists at all.

Parliament abolished the old market in the 1750s and the parishioners of St Saviour's opened a new one on new ground in 1756, which is the gap under the thousand-year claim. The only listed structure here came from Covent Garden, the Victorian ironwork is not listed at all, and the trustees are not what the statutes suggest.

One licensed market of 290 pitches, not a thousand stalls, trading a different part of the street on every day of the week and shut on bank holidays. The name, the Westway, the landmarks that are on neighbouring streets, the barriers, and the superlatives nobody official will make.

Not a Royal Park but the borough's, and the ruin at its centre was demolished rather than bombed flat. Three Japanese gardens of three different dates, an opera season older than its company, peafowl nobody has counted, and an area no two official sources agree on.

A commercial property scheme that only half happened, white stucco terraces that are mostly post-war rebuilds, a new garden opened in April 2026, the day forty people died on the lake, and a statutory register entry that its own list entries contradict four times over.

Westminster approved the Queen Elizabeth II National Memorial in April 2026, and it will replace the Blue Bridge and move Marlborough Gate. Where the park came from, the attribution to drop, the pelicans, the monuments, and the figures its own authorities disagree about.

Covent Garden was nearly demolished: the Greater London Council's redevelopment plan of 1968 was defeated by a forty-two-day public inquiry and the emergency listing of more than two hundred and fifty buildings in January 1973. The wholesale market left in 1974 and Charles Fowler's Georgian market building reopened as shops in 1980.

The Royal Opera House is the third theatre on its Covent Garden site, by E. M. Barry, opened in 1858 after two of its predecessors burned down. The organisation that runs it renamed itself Royal Ballet and Opera in 2024, but the building keeps its name. Since the Open Up works of 2018 anyone can go in without a ticket.

The City of London is a separate local authority, ceremonial county and police force of about one square mile, run by the Corporation, with a business vote that accounts for two-thirds of its electorate. The London Museum opens at Smithfield on 28 November 2026, and the Barbican has two closures ahead of it.

The Palace of Westminster was rebuilt in Perpendicular Gothic by Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin after the fire of 1834, with Westminster Hall of 1097 surviving at its heart. Big Ben is the bell, not the tower. Parliament has narrowed the choice on restoring the building to two options and will not decide between them before 2030.

Most of The Rocks was destroyed long before the famous rescue — by resumptions after the plague of 1900, then the Harbour Bridge approaches, then the Cahill Expressway. The green ban of November 1971 saved what was left, and the authority that had proposed the towers reviewed its own scheme in 1974 and spent twenty-five years conserving the place instead.

Ronda, split by the Tajo gorge and spanned by the Puente Nuevo of 1793, with Arab baths, a water mine cut inside the rock and one of the oldest bullrings in Spain.