Cleopatra's Needle

The lowdown

Standing on the Thames Embankment is an Egyptian obelisk far older than London itself, carved from pink granite around 1450 BC for a pharaoh and originally raised at Heliopolis. It has nothing to do with Cleopatra, but the romantic name stuck when it was gifted to Britain and shipped here in 1877, very nearly lost in a storm in the Bay of Biscay that killed six sailors.

Two bronze sphinxes guard its base, and if you look closely you can still see the gouges and shrapnel scars from a German bomb that fell nearby in the First World War, deliberately left unrepaired as a record. A time capsule buried beneath it in 1878 holds Victorian newspapers, coins and photographs.

It is free, ancient and gloriously incongruous, three and a half thousand years of Egyptian history parked beside the London traffic. A must-see stop on any free walk along the river.