A King's Last Steps, A Monument That Doubled as a Telescope

Banqueting House looks like a grand party venue, and for most of its history it was one — but it's also the last building Charles I ever walked through. On the morning of his execution in January 1649, he was led across the same hall, under Rubens ceiling paintings commissioned by his own father, then out through a first-floor window onto a scaffold built against the building's front. He'd asked for an extra-thick shirt that morning, worried the winter cold might make him shiver and look, to the crowd below, like fear.

The Monument to the Great Fire isn't just a memorial — it was designed to double as scientific equipment. Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke built a hidden laboratory into the base, with a hollow central shaft running the full height of the column up to the viewing platform, so the whole structure could function as a giant zenith telescope pointed straight up at the sky. Hooke was hoping to find observational proof that the Earth orbits the sun. It never worked — traffic rumbling past on the street below shook the column just enough to blur every reading he tried to take.