Lloyd's Building

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Lloyd's Building

The one outstanding exception is Richard Rogers' extraordinary Lloyd's Building (1986), on Lime Street. Its guts-on-the outside design draws much from Paris's Pompidou Centre, also by Rogers, and is the sort of daring, uncompromising architectural vision that is so rarely seen in the conservative City. Part of the facade of the old 353f52d 1928 building (on Leadenhall Street) has been left standing. Lloyd's of London, the largest insurance market in the world, is a remarkable and unique organisation; a society of underwriters (names) that accepts all insurance risks for personal loss or gain. It traces its roots back to Edward Lloyd's coffee shop in Tower Street in the 1860s. Traditionally, being a Name seemed to involve nothing but waiting for regular fat cheques to pop through your letterbox. That this was all too good to be true was made brutally clear in the early 1990s, when a series of disasters caused Lloyd's to suffer record losses of over a billion pounds. Many Names were personally ruined and the company came to the brink of collapse.

St Katharine's Dock

Just east of Tower Bridge on the north bank of the Thames, St Katharine's once housed over 1,000 cottages, a brewery and the twelfth-century church of St Katharine - all of which were demolished (without compensation) to make way for a grandiose new docklands development scheme in 1828. St Katharine's Dock, which was built over the old settlement, remained open until 1968, reemerging in 1973 as the first of the Docklands redevelopments. St Katharine's Haven is now a yacht marina; one corner of the dock houses a squadron of russet-sailed, turn-of-the-century barges. The restaurants, cafés and pubs around the dock pull in tourists by the coachload.

National Gallery

Founded in 1824 with just 38 pictures, the National Collection of Paintings now contains more than 2,000 western European paintings from the 1300 century to 1900 - it's indisputably one of the finest collections in the world. The quality and rage of pictures on display are stunning, with leather chesterfield sofas, lashings of marble and creaking wooden floors adding to the hallowed atmosphere. There is a good introductory guided tour, which concentrates of the major paintings on the ground floor, or you can pick up the excellent free audio guide from either of the two main entrances. The exterior of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's Sainsbury Wing has its detractor, but the exhibition space provides a superb setting for the fine collection of early Renaissance works as well as playing host of numberous temporary exhibitions throughout the year. And don't miss the Micro Gallery, where, at the touch of the screen, you can see any paintings in the collection, print out a reproduction which might include Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and Constable's The Hay Wain.