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London is often described as a collection of distinct urban villages rather than a single sprawling metropolis, due to the way it developed over time. Discover each neighbourhood's unique character and charm.
A mile of riverside built for a festival in 1951, with concert halls, the National Theatre and a skate spot underneath.
This was Lambeth Marsh: flooded ground, then pleasure gardens, then a hundred years of wharves and factories. What made it what it is now was one summer. The Festival of Britain in 1951 was staged here to cheer the country up after the war, and it left behind the Royal Festival Hall, the walk along the water, and the idea that the south bank was a place to go. The rest arrived over the next thirty years in unapologetic concrete: the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, and Denys Lasdun's National Theatre, which the Prince of Wales compared to a nuclear power station and which is now protected as one of the finest buildings of its date in the country. The BFI shows films underneath Waterloo Bridge, and a secondhand book market runs on the pavement outside it every day of the year. Under the Queen Elizabeth Hall is the undercroft, skated since the early 1970s and defended by its skaters against redevelopment; it is reckoned the oldest skate spot in the world still in use. At the western end the London Eye went up for the millennium and never came down, and County Hall behind it, the seat of London's government until 1986, is now an aquarium and two hotels. The whole length of it is a walk, and the walk is the point.