London's Most Iconic Landmarks

The Shard rises above London Bridge station on the south bank of the Thames, a tapering pyramid of glass designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and completed in 2012.

At roughly 310 metres it is the tallest building in the United Kingdom and one of the tallest in Western Europe, its form conceived as a spire of irregular glass fragments, or shards, that lean inward but never quite meet at the summit, leaving the top open to the sky.

The public heart of the building is The View from The Shard, an observation experience spread across the sixty-eighth to seventy-second floors.

From this height the city loses its street-level chaos and reveals its true shape: the Thames curling through the centre, the dome of St Paul's, the Tower of London, the clustered towers of the City, and on a clear day a panorama reaching some forty miles to the horizon.

The upper deck is partly open to the air, so you feel the wind and hear the hum of the living city drifting up from below.

Beyond the viewing galleries, the Shard is a vertical quarter in itself, stacking offices, restaurants, a hotel, and residences within a single slender profile.

Its glazed skin changes character with the weather, glowing pink at dawn, vanishing into low cloud, or catching the last gold of a summer evening, so that the tower reads differently from every bridge and street corner across the capital.

Tower Bridge spans the Thames just downstream of the Tower of London, a combined bascule and suspension bridge that opened in 1894 and has become one of the most instantly recognisable structures on earth.

Designed by the City Architect Horace Jones with the engineer John Wolfe Barry, its two towers were clad in ornate Victorian Gothic stonework, chosen to harmonise with the ancient fortress beside it, while a hidden framework of steel does the real structural work behind the decorative skin.

The bridge's genius lies in its movement: the central roadway is split into two bascules, or leaves, that can be raised to let tall vessels pass through.

Originally driven by steam-powered hydraulics that pumped pressurised water into vast accumulators, the mechanism still lifts the roadway regularly today, now under electric and oil-hydraulic power, and the schedule of raisings is published in advance so visitors can watch the spectacle.

High above the river, the two towers are linked by a pair of enclosed walkways, built so that pedestrians could still cross while the bridge was open to shipping.

These high-level walkways now form part of an exhibition that includes a stretch of glass floor, letting you look straight down at the traffic and water below, while the beautifully preserved Victorian Engine Rooms display the original steam machinery that powered the bridge for decades.

The British Museum in Bloomsbury is among the oldest and greatest museums on earth, founded in 1753 around the collection of the physician Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public in 1759 as a place of learning free to all.

Behind its imposing Greek Revival colonnade lies an encyclopedic collection tracing human history and culture across some two million years and every inhabited continent.

At its centre is the Great Court, a vast covered square wrapped around the old circular Reading Room and roofed in 2000 with a spectacular grid of glass and steel designed by Norman Foster, now the largest covered public square in Europe.

From here the galleries radiate outward to some of the most famous objects in the world: the Rosetta Stone, whose parallel scripts unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs; the Parthenon sculptures brought from Athens; the colossal Assyrian winged bulls; the treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial; and hall after hall of Egyptian mummies that draw crowds all day long.

The scale is almost overwhelming, and part of the museum's character is the ongoing debate about how its collection was assembled and whether some of its greatest treasures should return to their countries of origin.

Whatever your view, a visit is a journey through the whole span of human making, from ancient Mesopotamia to the art of the present, and it remains, remarkably, free to enter, a founding principle the museum has never abandoned.

Hyde Park spreads across some 350 acres in the middle of London, one of the largest and best loved of the eight Royal Parks.

Once a hunting ground seized by Henry VIII, it was opened to the public in 1637 and has served ever since as the city's gathering place, a vast open expanse of grass, ancient trees, and water where Londoners come to walk, ride, row, swim, protest, and simply escape the surrounding streets.

At its centre lies the Serpentine, a curving artificial lake created in the eighteenth century, where you can hire a rowing or pedal boat in summer, watch the hardy members of the Serpentine Swimming Club, or stroll to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, a low ring of flowing Cornish granite designed as a place to sit and dip your feet.

On the lake's banks the Serpentine Galleries show contemporary art, and each summer a leading architect designs a temporary pavilion beside them.

The park's northeast corner is home to Speakers' Corner, a long-standing site of free public debate where anyone may stand up and address the crowd, a tradition that has drawn orators and hecklers for well over a century.

Seamlessly joined to the adjoining Kensington Gardens, with Kensington Palace at its western edge, Hyde Park offers a genuine sense of countryside within the capital, alive from dawn joggers to evening picnickers all through the warmer months.

Elizabeth Tower rises at the north end of the Palace of Westminster beside the Thames, the clock tower that most of the world knows as Big Ben.

Strictly speaking Big Ben is the name of the largest bell inside, but the name has long since spread to the whole tower, completed in 1859 as part of the rebuilding of Parliament after fire destroyed the old palace.

Its richly detailed Gothic Revival design came from the architect Augustus Pugin, working with Sir Charles Barry on the wider palace.

The tower stands around 96 metres tall and houses the Great Clock, for decades the largest and most accurate striking clock in the world, its four dials each some seven metres across and lit from within so they glow after dark.

The mechanism drives the famous quarter chimes and the deep, resonant strike of Big Ben on the hour, a sound broadcast across the country and bound up with national occasions and the turning of the year.

Renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the tower recently emerged from a lengthy and meticulous restoration that cleaned its stonework, regilded its details, and returned the clock dials to their original colours.

Together with the pinnacled bulk of the Houses of Parliament and neighbouring Westminster Abbey, it forms one of the most photographed and instantly recognisable scenes in the world, best appreciated from Westminster Bridge or the far bank of the river.

The London Eye turns on the South Bank of the Thames directly opposite the Houses of Parliament, a giant observation wheel that opened in 2000 to mark the millennium and quickly became one of the most visited paid attractions in the country.

Designed by the husband-and-wife architects David Marks and Julia Barfield, it rises about 135 metres and was, when built, the tallest wheel of its kind in the world, an elegant piece of engineering that has reshaped the London riverscape.

Unlike a traditional Ferris wheel, the Eye is cantilevered, supported on one side by an A-frame so that the entire rim appears to float out over the river.

Its 32 sealed glass capsules, one for each of the London boroughs, are mounted on the outside of the rim and rotate gently to stay level, carrying passengers on a slow half-hour rotation that gives time to pick out landmark after landmark as the city unfolds.

From the top the view stretches across the whole of central London: the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben directly below, the river snaking past St Paul's and the towers of the City, Buckingham Palace among its parks, and on a clear day the green hills at the capital's edge.

The wheel has become a fixture of the city's celebrations, wreathed in fireworks each New Year's Eve, and the surrounding South Bank, with its walkways, galleries, and street performers, makes the approach an attraction in itself.