Our FIRST Day in London 🇬🇧 | Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Tower of London & Afternoon Tea

Comments · 70

• HO

  @HouseofJacobsTravels · 2 weeks ago · pinned

  🇬🇧 WE MADE IT TO LONDON! 🎡☕️<br><br>Our first day was PACKED — Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, the Tower of London, and then we finished it all with an afternoon tea cruise on the Thames!<br><br>If you could only pick <b>*ONE*</b> of these for your first day in London, which would you choose? 👇<br><br>And trust me… this is only the beginning of our London adventure! 🇬🇧

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• XA

  @xandra7986 · 2 weeks ago

  Westminster Abbey is worth it. It’s almost a thousand years old and is the site of every Coronation since 1066. Kings and Queens are buried there but also people such as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Issac Newton. Absolutely beautiful Abbey. The Tower of London is also a thousand years old. You’ve missed out on so much history. We’re an old city. That tall monument you saw is called The Monument. It commemorates the Great Fire of London 1666. It’s 202 feet in height and it’s 202 feet west of the spot in Pudding Lane where the Great Fire started. It was constructed in 1671 and was built on the site of the first church to be destroyed by the Great Fire. You can actually climb it to the top.

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• AN

  @Andreaod73 · 2 weeks ago (edited)

  It’s JUST this and it’s JUST that ! No enthusiasm from the big guy. Never seen anyone as unbothered by our Capital. His partner is much more likeable and interested in her surroundings

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• JO

  @johnroberts3066 · 1 day ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ozAPC3Ago&amp;t=1448">24:08</a> Never called Mayor&apos;s House. It was called County Hall. It was the headquarters of the (Greater) London&apos;s County Councils from 1922 til&apos; 1986. They then moved to a purpose built (glass faced) building by the Tower Bridge &amp; HMS Belfast. They have now moved again.

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• PH

  @philb2085 · 2 weeks ago

  You had great weather 😎

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• NE

  @NewStarts2025 · 2 weeks ago

  Where the London Eye, London Aquarium, London Dungeon and 2 hotels plus inside a few restaurants, it is called County Hall which in the section where it goes back in a curve, it is clearly on there in big letters (can be seen from the other end of Westminster Bridge where you were when you asked). <br><br>They are called scones in the UK, not biscuits. They also originate way before Chris Columbus found America. &nbsp;<br><br>Merlin Entertainments own the Legoland Resorts, the Orlando Eye and Madame Tussauds venues world wide. They don&apos;t have any theme parks in America. <br><br>The Monument you pointed out is a Monument to the Great Fire Of London between 2nd to 5th September, 1666

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• MI

  @michaelburley-l5o · 2 weeks ago

  Don&apos;t be so tight,go in the tower of London and you will see so much history not just 275 years

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• LI

  @lindashortall8761 · 2 weeks ago

  I went Westminster &nbsp;abbey a couple &nbsp;of weeks ago it was thirty something pounds, well worth it was amazing 😊

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• LL

  @lloydcollins6337 · 2 weeks ago (edited)

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ozAPC3Ago&amp;t=1450">24:10</a> to be precise, it was the offices of the Greater London Council. To get into a bit of history, London has never really been a unified city as such until the 1960s. Before that, it was a collection of various counties which controlled parts of the Greater London Area, plus the City of London, which refers to the square mile in the centre of the city which has existed &quot;since time immemorial&quot; and which was firmly established when William the Conqueror invaded in 1066. He did a deal with the residents of the City of London to recognise him as King, in exchange for which he recognised their historical rights and privileges - to this day in the City of London the Monarch has to ask permission to enter, companies have voting rights, and the post of &quot;The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor of the City of London&quot; is taken up for a 1 year term of office by a leading business figure, being elected by a court of Sheriffs and Aldermen. <br><br>Anyway, in 1957 a Royal Commission was founded to look into how London might be run better, and it recommended the creation of a number of Boroughs which would be led by a unitary authority, the Greater London Council, which would have powers over whole-of-London matters like emergency services, transport, roads, and house building, with the local Borough councils being responsible for local services like waste collection etc. This report was duly revised by Parliament and voted into law, and in 1965 the Greater London Council was established, along with 32 new London Boroughs, with the surrounding counties ceding territory to these boroughs (or outright being dissolved, like the London County Council). &nbsp;<br><br>The Greater London Council was dissolved in 1986 by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher, who devolved it&apos;s powers to the boroughs, with some matters being given to various boards made up of elected officials from the councils (for example emergency services and waste collection). The abolition was mainly due to the election as Mayor of Ken Livingstone, a prominent Labour politician at the socialist end of the scale. <br><br>When the Labour party won the 1997 general election they had committed as a manifesto pledge to bring back citywide government for London, and so they founded the Greater London Authority, which had most of the powers the old GLC had. The first Mayor of London was duly elected, and it was none other than Ken Livingstone! His first words in his victory speech were recorded as &quot;As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted 14 years ago...&quot;<br><br>The name of the building is the &quot;County Hall&quot; in Lambeth and it was originally built between 1911 and 1922 as the headquarters of the London County Council. Two new wings were added between 1936 and 1939, and another was built in 1974 on a nearby roundabout, called the &quot;Island block&quot;. This block was demolished in 2006 and is now the site of a hotel, the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. The building itself is now owned by a Japanese investor and hosts a number of venues, including the Sea Life London Aquarium, the London Dungeon, a Shrek exhibit, and the London Eye is very nearby.

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• LL

  @lloydcollins6337 · 2 weeks ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ozAPC3Ago&amp;t=1179">19:39</a> so there&apos;s a lot of history to bridges in London. The Romans were the first people we knew who built a bridge over the Thames where London is today and the stumps of the piers of this still survive on the Thames foreshore and were excavated a few years back. We know there was a bridge roughly where London bridge is today in the early 1000s (roughly the &quot;Viking era&quot;) as it was destroyed to prevent an army crossing the border between Kingdoms, and another burned down in the early Medieval period in 1136.<br><br>The most famous London Bridge, the one the nursery rhyme was created for, was built in 1209 and stood until 1831. For much of that time it was the only bridge across the Thames for miles, the next-nearest was roughly 15 miles away upriver at Kingston-Upon-Thames, and there was no further bridge downriver as the estuary was too wide to cross. This version of London Bridge was started in 1176 after King Henry II ordered a new stone bridge to replace the existing wooden one, partly as penitence for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, being murdered ostensibly on the King&apos;s orders. The bridge had chapels at each end and one in the centre (on two levels, one at bridge height and one at water height) dedicated to Thomas Becket. <br><br>Building completed in 1209 after the project stalled several times due to the enormous resources required (special taxes had to be levied to afford it). Houses with shops at street level were also built along the length of the bridge, with their rents/sales funding the construction costs as well. In order to make back money a toll was imposed on anyone wanting to cross the bridge to pay for upkeep. <br><br>The bridge was constructed out of stone except for one span in the centre, which was a wooden drawbridge - this protected the city as this could be raised in the event of attack. Several collapses of bridge spans were recorded due to lack of maintenance, the most famous of which sparked the nursery rhyme &quot;London Bridge is Falling Down&quot;, which relates to a collapse in the 1280s - Eleanor of Provence, the Queen of King Henry III, had been granted the toll revenues from the bridge by her husband the King, however she was supposed to pay for maintenance out of these funds, keeping the leftovers. The story goes that she neglected the bridge, causing part of it to collapse. We do know from historical record that the custody of the bridge revenues was removed from her in 1281 and handed over to a trust, the Bridge House Trust, which is still in existence to this day, now named the City Bridge Foundation, which is a charity and property fund management company, run by the City of London (note this is not &quot;London&quot; but the Square Mile which is the City of London and not part of Greater London, but that&apos;s another topic). <br><br>The bridge required constant maintenance on it&apos;s foundations (piers), which were sunk into the river bed and protected by wooden walls filled in with rubble (called &quot;starlings&quot;). The number of piers and starlings restricted the space for water to flow past the bridge significantly, to the point where at low tide (the Thames is tidal right through the majority of London) there could be a difference in water level on each side of the bridge of up to 6 feet, making it basically impossible to travel under the river by boat unless at high tide - attempting to cross was called &quot;shooting the bridge&quot; and must have been a close experience to white-water rafting today. <br><br>Because the bridge was the only bridge in the area it was totally inadequate for the level of traffic wanting to cross it - so much so that crossing often took upwards of an hour. If you wanted to get across quickly you used a boat, and these men organised themselves into a guild which still exists (most London guilds are still going these days as charitable organisations) - called the &quot;Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames&quot;. Using a boat was more expensive than the bridge, but it was quicker if you only had a small amount of goods to move. You could also be rowed up and down river as well, which was often quicker than walking the streets. <br><br>There were several fires on the bridge and it&apos;s associated houses, including one in 1633 which destroyed the buildings on the northern end of the bridge. In a way this was lucky, as by 1666 the buildings had not been rebuilt, which meant that when the Great Fire of London reached the bridge the fire could not spread over the bridge and set fire to the houses on the south side of the river. <br><br>By the 1700s people had started to recognise that more crossings of the river were needed, with new bridges springing up further upriver at places like Putney. It was also recognised that the London Bridge was getting much older, so in 1756 a law was passed and all the houses and buildings on the bridge were purchased and knocked down, reducing weight on the structure. Two of it&apos;s arches were also made into one larger one to allow larger ships to pass under the bridge. However, this new &quot;grand arch&quot; weakened the bridge and the repair bill only increased as it needed constant maintenance. <br><br>So in 1799 a competition began to submit designs for a new London Bridge, and in 1824 work began to build a replacement, designed by John Rennie. This was built 100ft upstream of the original bridge, so as to maintain a crossing whilst the new one was built, with construction finishing in 1831. Demolition then began on the original bridge. <br><br>The new bridge was found to be sinking about an inch every 8 years during a survey in 1924. The decision was taken in 1968 to replace the bridge and in order to raise funds the existing bridge was placed on the market for sale and was purchased by Robert McCulloch who had the bridge disassembled stone by stone and moved to Lake Havasu, Arizona, where it stands to this day. The bridge in Arizona though is only the fascia stones build around a steel core. <br><br>The current London bridge was completed in 1973 and is modern in construction, being composed mainly of prestressed concrete. The bridge cost was met entirely by the Bridge House Trust (as mentioned above) which is still responsible for the bridge and it&apos;s maintenance. The new bridge is wider than the old one, so to build the new one whilst keeping the old one operating they built the outside half of the bridge, moved traffic onto it, then disassembled the old bridge and built the inside half.

• LL

  @lloydcollins6337 · 2 weeks ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8ozAPC3Ago&amp;t=1415">23:35</a> that building is called &quot;Whitehall Court&quot; and is home to The Royal Horseguards Hotel along with various other establishments. It was built in 1884 as luxury apartments although it turns out it was at the centre of a pyramid funding scheme run by a member of parliament which left the investors penniless.

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• MA

  @MaxwellMoore-d1u · 2 weeks ago

  Westminster Abbey is Free to the local diocese to Worship in ,

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