Remains of the Old London Bridge

The lowdown

The medieval London Bridge, the one crowded with houses, shops and the heads of traitors on spikes, was demolished in the 1830s when a new bridge replaced it. A few of its stone alcoves, where pedestrians once sheltered from the traffic and the weather, were salvaged and scattered around the city.

Two of them now stand quietly among the trees in east London's Victoria Park, looking like little stone shelters with no obvious purpose. It is free to find them, and to sit where Londoners sheltered on the most famous bridge in the world, six hundred years of history hidden in plain sight in a local park.