Things We See while in London

The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The Gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection is free of charge. It is the fourth most visited art museum in the world, after the Musée du Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum.

The museum is a major London tourist attraction, attracting 2.7 million visitors annually. The collections form an enduring record of scientific, technological and medical change since the eighteenth century.

The British Museum is a museum in London dedicated to human history and culture. Its permanent collection, numbering some eight million works, is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.

Items in the collection include the Rosetta Stone, numerous mummies, and Egyptian statues dating from as far back as 3000 BC. Some objects in the collection, most notably the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, are the objects of intense controversy and of calls for restitution to their countries of origin.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A), is the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. Named after Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, it was founded in 1852, and has since grown to cover 12.5 acres (51,000 m2) and 145 galleries. Its collection spans 5,000 years of art, from ancient times to the present day, in virtually every medium, from the cultures of Europe, North America, Asia and North Africa.

The holdings of ceramics, glass, textiles, costumes, silver, ironwork, jewelry, furniture, medieval objects, sculpture, prints and printmaking, drawings and photographs are among the largest, important and most comprehensive in the world. The museum possesses the world's largest collection of post-classical sculpture, the holdings of Italian Renaissance items are the largest outside Italy. The departments of Asia include art from South Asia, China, Japan, Korea and the Islamic world. The East Asian collections are among the best in Europe, with particular strengths in ceramics and metalwork, while the Islamic collection, alongside the British Museum, Musée du Louvre and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, is amongst the largest in the Western world.

Next you’ll be taken into the huge Great Hall where many meals were taken and dramas unfolded.

Along the way you’ll get to see the real costumes and props Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint wore during filming. You can also visit the classrooms where the Hogwarts students spent time studying.

You’ll be amazed at the high quality and detail of the Studio Tour as you step inside Gryffindor common room, visit Dumbledore’s office, peer into Hagrid’s hut and see the incredible animatronic door to the Chamber of Secrets. Create your own movie and ride a broomstick in the green screen room, step onto Platform 9¾ and see inside the Hogwarts Express. Don’t leave without buying a delicious Butterbeer to taste for yourself!

The name Big Ben is often used to describe the tower, the clock and the bell but the name was first given to the Great Bell. The Elizabeth Tower was completed in 1859 and the Great Clock started on 31 May, with the Great Bell's strikes heard for the first time on 11 July and the quarter bells first chimed on 7 September. The clock tower chimes are one of the most well-known sounds that ring across London. Big Ben then strikes the hour, creating the 'bongs' that have become so famous across the world, since they started in 1859.

Here are some of the fascinating facts and figures about the Elizabeth Tower:

• Dimensions: over 96 metres and 12 metres square
• Steps to belfry: 334
• Steps to lantern (the Ayrton Light): 393
• Amount of stone used: 850 cubic metres
• Amount of bricks used: 2600 cubic metres
• Number of floors: 11

The bell was cast in 1858 and is said to be named either after the Commissioner of Works at the time, Benjamin Hall, or the champion heavyweight boxer Ben Caunt. The note from the bell is E. Big Ben weighs 13.8 tons (tonnes).

Westminster Abbey is steeped in more than a thousand years of history. Benedictine monks first came to this site in the middle of the tenth century, establishing a tradition of daily worship which continues to this day. The Abbey has been the coronation church since 1066 and is the final resting place of seventeen monarchs. The present church, begun by Henry III in 1245, is one of the most important Gothic buildings in the country, with the medieval shrine of an Anglo-Saxon saint still at its heart. Every monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned here, with the exception of a couple of unlucky Eds who were murdered (Edward V) or abdicated (Edward VIII) before the magic moment. Look out for the strangely ordinary-looking Coronation Chair. A treasure house of paintings, stained glass, pavements, textiles and other artifacts, Westminster Abbey is also the place where some of the most significant people in the nation's history are buried or commemorated. Taken as a whole the tombs and memorials comprise the most significant single collection of monumental sculpture anywhere in the United Kingdom.

The houses of British Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, have met in the Palace of Westminster since around 1550. A royal palace has been on the site for around 1,000 years, but most of what you see dates from the mid 19th century when the Palace was rebuilt after a 1834 fire destroyed the medieval buildings. The oldest part of the Palace is Westminster Hall, built between 1097 and 1099 by William Rufus. Henry VIII was the last monarch to live there; he moved out in 1512. After that, it served as the home of Parliament, which had been meeting there since the thirteenth century, and the seat of the Royal Courts of Justice, based in and around Westminster Hall. In 1834, an even greater fire ravaged the heavily rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and the only structures of significance to survive were Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St Stephen's, the Chapel of St Mary.

The Millennium Bridge, officially known as the London Millennium Footbridge, is a steel suspension bridge for pedestrians crossing the River Thames in London, England, linking Bankside with the City. It is located between Southwark Bridge (downstream) and Blackfriars Railway Bridge (upstream). The southern end of the bridge is near Globe Theatre, the Bankside Gallery and Tate Modern, the north end next to the City of London School below St Paul's Cathedral. The bridge alignment is such that a clear view of St Paul's south façade is presented from across the river, framed by the bridge supports. You may recognize it as the bridge destroyed by Death Eaters in the Harry Potter movies.

The London Underground (often shortened to the Underground) is a rapid transit system in the United Kingdom, serving a large part of Greater London. The oldest sections of the London Underground completed 150 years of operations on 10 January 2013. The Underground system is also colloquially known as the Tube.

The Underground serves 270 stations and has 402 kilometres (250 mi) of track. It is the fourth largest metro system in the world in terms of route miles, after the Seoul Metropolitan Subway, the Shanghai Metro and the Beijing Subway. It also has one of the largest numbers of stations. In 2007, more than one billion passenger journeys were recorded, and in the year 2011/12 passenger numbers were just under 1.2 billion making it the third busiest metro system in Europe, after Moscow and Paris.

Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, an Elizabethan playhouse in the London Borough of Southwark, on the south bank of the River Thames that was destroyed by fire in 1613, rebuilt in 1614, and then demolished in 1644. The modern reconstruction is an academic approximation based on available evidence of the 1599 and 1614 buildings. It was founded by the actor and director Sam Wanamaker and built about 230 metres (750 ft) from the site of the original theatre and opened to the public in 1995, with a production of Henry V. The site also includes a shell reconstruction of the Blackfriars Theatre, another Elizabethan theatre.

St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral and seat of the Bishop of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. St Paul's sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, and is the mother church of the Diocese of London. The present church dating from the late 17th century was built to an English Baroque design of Sir Christopher Wren, as part of a major rebuilding program which took place in the city after the Great Fire of London, and was completed within his lifetime. The cathedral is one of the most famous and most recognizable sights of London, with its dome, framed by the spires of Wren's City churches, dominating the skyline for 300 years. At 365 feet (111 m) high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1962, and its dome is also among the highest in the world. In terms of area, St Paul's is the second largest church building in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral.

Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, more commonly known as the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames.  It was founded towards the end of 1066 as part of the Norman Conquest of England. The White Tower, which gives the entire castle its name, was built by William the Conqueror in 1078, and was a resented symbol of oppression, inflicted upon London by the new ruling elite. The castle was used as a prison since at least 1100, although that was not its primary purpose. A grand palace early in its history, it served as a royal residence. As a whole, the Tower is a complex of several buildings set within two concentric rings of defensive walls and a moat. There were several phases of expansion, mainly under Kings Richard the Lionheart, Henry III, and Edward I in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The general layout established by the late 13th century remains despite later activity on the site. The Tower of London has played a prominent role in English history. It was besieged several times and controlling it has been important to controlling the country. The Tower has served variously as an armoury, a treasury, a menagerie, the home of the Royal Mint, a public records office, and the home of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. From the early 14th century until the reign of Charles II, a procession would be led from the Tower to Westminster Abbey on the coronation of a monarch. In the absence of the monarch, the Constable of the Tower is in charge of the castle. This was a powerful and trusted position in the medieval period. In the late 15th century the castle was the prison of the Princes in the Tower. Under the Tudors, the Tower became used less as a royal residence, and despite attempts to refortify and repair the castle its defences lagged behind developments to deal with artillery.