Chelsea Chained Library

The lowdown

Inside Chelsea Old Church, a riverside church with roots going back to Norman times, sits the only chained library left in London. In an age when books were as valuable as silver, they were secured to their shelves with chains so they could be read but never carried off, and this little collection survives exactly so.

The books were given in 1718, among them a Vinegar Bible famous for a printing error, and they remain chained to their case as a rare survival of how reading once worked. It is a small thing, free to see, but a genuinely unusual window into the history of the written word.

The church around it is worth the trip in its own right, rebuilt after wartime bombing, full of monuments including one to Thomas More, who worshipped here, in a peaceful pocket of old Chelsea by the Thames.