Monuments & Ruins

Not every statue in London. The ones worth crossing the road for: Roman wall, medieval ruins, and the monuments that earn a detour.

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Cleopatra's Needle

A 3,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk on the Embankment, with bomb scars from 1917 and a time capsule underneath.

MemorialsFree

Photo by Robert Lamb, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Cut in Aswan for Thutmose III around 1450 BC and set up at Heliopolis, with Ramesses II's inscriptions added two centuries later; moved to Alexandria by the Romans, given to Britain in 1819, and left lying in the sand for sixty years because nobody would pay to ship it. It came in 1877 in a purpose-built iron cylinder that was cast adrift in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, drowning six men, and recovered. The two bronze sphinxes were added in 1881 facing the wrong way, towards it rather than guarding it, and the right-hand sphinx's plinth still carries the shrapnel holes from the first bombing raid on London in September 1917. Buried beneath is a box containing, among other things, a set of coins, a railway guide and photographs of the twelve best-looking Englishwomen of the day.

Where
Victoria Embankment, WC2N 6PB
Nearest station
Embankment · 2 min walk

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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

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