Westminster Abbey

Every English and British monarch since 1066 has been crowned in Westminster Abbey — William the Conqueror started the tradition on Christmas Day of that year, and Charles III continued it in 2023 on the same spot, seated over the same 700-year-old Coronation Chair (graffiti from Georgian schoolboys included; it's on display). The building holding this thousand-year continuity is the finest Gothic interior in Britain, its 31-metre nave the country's tallest, built by Henry III in the 1200s to house both the crown's ceremonies and its dead.

Because that's the Abbey's second identity: the national mausoleum. Seventeen monarchs lie here — Elizabeth I sharing a chapel with the half-sister who imprisoned her, Mary Queen of Scots given an equal tomb by her son as a pointed correction — but the democratic dead make it extraordinary. Poets' Corner collects Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Kipling and memorials to everyone from Shakespeare to Handel (buried here too, near the choir he wrote for). Scientists' Corner buries Newton and Darwin an aisle apart, with Stephen Hawking's ashes between them since 2018. And by the west door, the Grave of the Unknown Warrior — the one floor stone nobody ever walks on — still receives the bouquet of every royal bride.

The included multimedia guide is genuinely good, but the upgrade that matters is the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries: the medieval triforium 16 metres above the nave, opened to the public in 2018 after 700 years, holding the funeral effigies (Elizabeth I's reconstructed face, Nelson's hat) and the best view down the nave that exists.

Book the timed entry online and go at 9:30 opening — coronation-spot, tombs and Poets' Corner before the coach groups land at 11. Better yet, return for Evensong (most days at 5 PM): entry is free for the service, the choir is world-class, and you experience the building doing what it was built for rather than being toured through it.