Cleopatra's Needle

Right. First things first. This has absolutely nothing to do with Cleopatra. The name is completely wrong. This obelisk was carved for Pharaoh Thutmose the Third around fourteen fifty BC — a full thousand years before Cleopatra was even born. It's three thousand five hundred years old. It stood at Heliopolis in Egypt for most of human civilisation before the Victorians decided they wanted it.

Getting it to London nearly ended in disaster. In eighteen seventy-seven, they encased it in an iron cylinder-shaped pontoon and tried to tow it across the Mediterranean. A storm hit in the Bay of Biscay, the pontoon broke loose, and six volunteer crew members drowned trying to save it. The obelisk was found floating days later by a Spanish ship and eventually made it to the Thames.

Now look at the base. See the sphinx? Look closely at the one on the right. You'll notice pockmarks and gouges in the stone. Those are shrapnel scars from a German air raid on the fourth of September nineteen seventeen — the First World War, not the Second. They've been deliberately left unrepaired as a war memorial. A small plaque nearby explains what happened.

But the best part is what's underneath. When they erected the obelisk in eighteen seventy-eight, the Victorians buried a time capsule in the pedestal. Inside it they placed: twelve photographs of the best-looking English women of the day, a box of hairpins, a set of British coins, a razor, cigars, copies of that day's newspapers, a portrait of Queen Victoria, Bradshaw's Railway Guide, and a Bible. That's the Victorian era in a single box — beautiful women, trains, tobacco, God, and grooming.