CitiesEngland
In 1666 fire cleared the medieval City and London chose not to take the opportunity. Christopher Wren produced a baroque plan of radiating avenues and open quays within days; it was judged impracticable and dropped. Property owners went back to their old plots and rebuilt on the lines that were already there, with the streets widened to standard profiles rather than redrawn. Lisbon's king got a blank canvas nine decades later. London's freeholders refused to give one up.
Wren's replacement for the cathedral the fire destroyed, and his consolation prize after the city plan was rejected. He also oversaw the rebuilding of more than fifty parish churches. The dome is three shells: an inner one for the view from below, an outer one for the skyline, and a hidden brick cone between them doing the structural work.
The square mile of the original walled city, still a separate local authority with its own police force and its own peculiar franchise in which businesses vote. Its street plan is medieval because of what did not happen in 1666. Walk it on a Sunday and it is close to empty, which is the clearest way to see the shape.
A castle begun by William I to hold down a city that had just been conquered, and used since as palace, mint, menagerie, armoury and prison. The White Tower's stone was shipped from Caen in Normandy. Building a fortress out of imported French stone in the middle of an English city was the point rather than a logistical accident.
The coronation church, and functionally a national burial ground with a working congregation inside it. The Coronation Chair has visitor graffiti carved into it by eighteenth and nineteenth-century schoolboys and tourists, which nobody has removed. A chair used for every coronation since 1308 is covered in idle vandalism.
Founded in 1753 on the collection of one man, Hans Sloane, whose wealth was tied to Jamaican plantations. The Great Court roof, added in 2000, covers what had been an open courtyard hidden behind the reading room for a century and a half. Half the museum's floor space was invisible to the public until then.
A food market on a site that has hosted trading for roughly a thousand years, tucked under railway arches at the south end of London Bridge. Its current fame is recent and largely a product of the 1990s. The medieval market was on the bridge approach because tolls and taxes worked differently on the Southwark bank.
A power station converted into a gallery in 2000, its turbine hall left as a single enormous void. Bankside generated electricity for the City across the river. The building's chimney was deliberately built lower than St Paul's dome so as not to compete with it, which is a rare piece of industrial deference.
Eight hundred acres of rough grassland and woodland with swimming ponds, held as open space after a long legal fight with a landowner who wanted to build on it. It is not a designed park and is deliberately not maintained as one. The ponds are reservoirs, dug to supply water, now used for year-round outdoor swimming.
The naval and astronomical complex downriver, and the origin of the prime meridian. The line was fixed here by international agreement in 1884 largely because most of the world's shipping was already using British charts. Greenwich became the centre of global timekeeping by commercial default rather than by geography.
A Victorian covered market of painted ironwork in the middle of the financial district, on a site that was Roman before it was anything else. The basilica of Roman London stood roughly here. Layers of commerce have occupied the same ground continuously for the better part of two thousand years.
London had one chance to redesign itself and turned it down.
Wren submitted a baroque plan of wide radiating streets within days of the 1666 fire. It was rejected as impracticable, freeholders rebuilt on their existing plots, and the City kept a medieval street pattern that survives today.
Lisbon took the offer London refused.
After its 1755 earthquake Lisbon replaced a medieval tangle with Pombal's rational grid, because the crown could impose it. London's rebuilding was governed by property rights and regulation rather than a master plan, which is the whole difference between the two street maps.
St Paul's dome is three domes.
An inner shell sized for the view from the floor, an outer shell sized for the skyline, and a concealed brick cone between them carrying the lantern's weight. What you see from inside and what you see from outside are different structures.
The Tower of London is built from French stone.
The White Tower was faced with limestone brought from Caen in Normandy. A newly arrived conqueror built a fortress in the middle of a hostile city out of material shipped from his own duchy.
The Coronation Chair is covered in graffiti and nobody has cleaned it off.
Schoolboys and visitors carved their names into it during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chair has been used at coronations since 1308 and the vandalism has simply been left in place as part of the object.
The City of London lets companies vote.
The square mile is its own local authority with a franchise in which businesses, not just residents, elect the council. It also retains its own police force, separate from the Metropolitan Police that covers everywhere else.
The world set its clocks by Greenwich because of paperwork.
The prime meridian was fixed here in 1884 largely because most global shipping already navigated on British charts that used it. Standardising on Greenwich was the path of least commercial resistance rather than a geographic decision.
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