London in a day

Westminster, and the Big Ben that isn’t Big Ben

Start here, with the fact settled: Big Ben isn’t the tower. Big Ben is the great bell inside, 13 tonnes of it, and the tower was simply called the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower for the Queen’s jubilee. Everyone calls it Big Ben anyway, the English included, so don’t go correcting anyone. The Parliament you see is mid-19th century: the medieval palace burned down entirely in 1834 and was rebuilt in neo-Gothic, however medieval it looks. Opposite is Westminster Abbey, where English monarchs have been crowned without interruption since 1066, and where Newton, Darwin and Dickens are buried. That one is paid and worth the queue if you have time.

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery

Up Whitehall, past Downing Street and the ministries, you reach Trafalgar Square, with Nelson on his column looking south, towards the sea. On the square’s fourth plinth, left empty in 1840 because the money ran out, a different contemporary artwork has been installed every few years since 1999.

And at the top, the National Gallery, free entry and no excuses: Van Gogh, Turner, Velázquez, Vermeer, Caravaggio. No booking needed and no need to see it all. Go in for an hour, look at ten paintings and leave.

That this is free in the centre of a European capital remains astonishing, and it has a date: British national museums abolished admission charges in 2001.

The river and the Tate Modern

Drop to the river and follow the south bank east: it’s the best walk in London, Westminster behind and the City ahead. You pass the National Theatre, the second-hand book stalls under Waterloo Bridge and the Globe, the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s theatre.

Tate Modern is a coal-fired power station that became obsolete and that Herzog & de Meuron turned into a museum in 2000, keeping the chimney and the turbine hall. Entry is free, and the Turbine Hall, a 35-metre-high space, is the best piece in it.

Then cross the Millennium Bridge, pedestrian, which leads straight to St Paul’s: it’s the best frame of the cathedral there is.

St Paul’s and the Monument

Christopher Wren’s cathedral went up after the Great Fire of 1666, which levelled the entire City: four days of fire, five-sixths of the walled city destroyed and the previous medieval cathedral with it. Inside is the Whispering Gallery, a circular walkway at the base of the dome where a word whispered at the wall can be heard on the far side, 32 metres away. And ten minutes away, the best detail in London: the Monument to the Great Fire, a stone column 62 metres tall raised by Wren himself. Why 62 metres? Because it stands exactly 62 metres from the bakery on Pudding Lane where the fire began. Topple it and the tip would land on the spot. You can climb it, 311 steps.

The Tower, and the bridge that isn’t London Bridge

The end of the day and another misunderstanding cleared up: the famous bridge, the one with two neo-Gothic towers that opens in the middle, is Tower Bridge. London Bridge is the one next to it, a slab of concrete with no charm whatsoever that disappoints everyone who goes looking for it.

And there’s more: the previous London Bridge, the Victorian one, was sold in 1968 to an American businessman who dismantled it stone by stone and rebuilt it in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, in the desert, where it still stands. The legend says he thought he was buying Tower Bridge. He always denied it.

The Tower of London next door is a thousand years old, holds the Crown Jewels and its ravens: superstition says that if they leave, the kingdom falls, so their wings are clipped a little, just in case.