Tourism

Lady Wallace's will never forbade lending — that was the trustees' own reading of it, abandoned in 2019 by a Charity Commission order rather than an Act of Parliament. What does bind is a statute of 1992 barring this museum, alone among the national collections, from ever adding or disposing of an object. Hertford House is Grade II; the fountain in front of it is Grade II*.

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.

The portico on Millbank is shut until 2027 and the way in is round the side. Four official names in a hundred and thirty years, Henry Tate's money and what Tate itself has published about it, a Turner bequest that built no almshouses, the flood of 1928, and the restaurant that is now a gallery.

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.

The Science Museum's collections date from 1857 inside the South Kensington Museum and the institution from its formal separation on 26 June 1909. The building is not listed, despite frequent claims otherwise. Stephenson's Rocket left London in 2018 and is now at York, and the Exploring Space gallery closed in 2025.

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.

Tate Modern occupies Giles Gilbert Scott's Bankside power station, a building the state formally declined to protect in 1993. Admission to the collection displays is free. The top-floor viewing level reopened as Level 10 in 2023 after a Supreme Court ruling in favour of the neighbouring residents who overlook it.