Buckingham Palace

This is the house that George III bought for his wife in 1761 because she found St James's Palace too stuffy. It wasn't even a palace then — just a large townhouse called Buckingham House, where fourteen of their fifteen children were born. It took another seventy-six years and the stubbornness of Queen Victoria before it officially became the monarch's London residence, and the building has been catching up with its own importance ever since.

The numbers are absurd. Seven hundred and seventy-five rooms, including fifty-two royal and guest bedrooms, a hundred and eighty-eight staff bedrooms, ninety-two offices, and seventy-eight bathrooms. There are over fifteen hundred doors, seven hundred and sixty windows, and more than forty thousand lightbulbs — the ballroom got electricity first, back in 1883. The ballroom itself, completed in 1855, stretches thirty-six metres long, and it's where investitures and state banquets still happen today.

During the Blitz, a German bomb destroyed the palace chapel. Rather than rebuild it as a place of worship, they turned the site into the Queen's Gallery, which opened to the public in 1962 to show off works from the Royal Collection. The State Rooms have been open to visitors during summer since 1993 — a decision partly driven by the need to fund repairs to Windsor Castle after its devastating fire in 1992.

The Changing of the Guard ceremony out front has become one of London's most watched rituals, but the palace itself remains a working building. It hosts around fifty thousand guests each year at garden parties, state dinners, and investitures. The famous balcony overlooking the Mall has been the stage for royal waves since 1851, when Victoria stepped out to greet crowds visiting the Great Exhibition.