A few fun facts about London
Here are a few fun facts about London
-London is the world’s most cosmopolitan city with an estimated 300 languages spoken and used to be the most densely populated city in the world until it lost its title to Tokyo in 1925. It was once two cities- the city of London and the city of Westminster, and they combined to form Greater London.
-London once had over a dozen rivers, but today many of them have been build over, but some still flow beneath the streets of London.
-London is the greenest city of its size in the world. Green space covers almost 40 per cent of greater London; that’s roughly 173 square km.
-In June 2012 the House of Commons announced that the clock tower was to be renamed the Elizabeth Tower in honour of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee.
A special light above the clock face is illuminated when parliament is in session,
Big Ben’s timekeeping is strictly regulated by a stack of coins placed on the huge pendulum.
Big Ben has rarely stopped. Even after a bomb destroyed the Commons chamber during the Second World War, the clock tower survived and Big Ben continued to strike the hours.
Tower Bridge is 244 metres (800 feet) long, covered in 22,000 litres (5,812gal) of paint and crossed by 40,000 people each day.
-London has about 33 bridges. The drawbridge on the London postcards is Tower Bridge. Other landmarks include the Vauxhall bridge, adorned with bronze sculptures; the Southwark bridge which features the world’s longest cast iron span at 73 meters; and Waterloo bridge, also nicknamed the Ladies bridge as it was erected by female workers back in World War II.
The Millennium Bridge which opened to the public in June 2000, used to have a wobbling problem caused by the numbers of people crossing the bridge at one time. The wobble has been fixed now but “the wobbly bridge” nickname still remains.
-The London Underground was established in 1863 and was world’s first urban train network. An estimated 3.5 million journeys are made daily.
-The 21,000 licensed London black taxi cabs are registers as Hackney Carriages or horse drawn carriages, and even though they are called black taxis they come into 12 different colors.
-The London Eye is 137 metres (450 feet). This makes it the fifth tallest structure in London. The wheel part of the structure is over 200 times larger than the average bike wheel, and you can see around 40km from the top on a clear day. In one year the London Eye will rotate 7668 times, or 2300 miles – as far as from London to Cairo in Egypt. The London Eye carries 32 sealed and air-conditioned passenger capsules attached to its external circumference. Each capsule holds approximately 25 people.
-During the 1200’s a royal zoo was founded at the Tower of London and remained there for 600 years. It was filled with exotic animals such as polar bears, lions, kangaroos, ostriches and elephants. When the zoo closed down in 1835, all the animals where moved to the new London Zoo.
-The Shard, at 306 metres tall, briefly held the top spot for the whole of Europe before two buildings in Moscow overtook it within a year!The Shard building is named as it is modeled on a shard of glass, and its 11,000 panels have a total area of 56,000 square metres.
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