#35 CHURCHILL WAR ROOMS
The Churchill War Rooms are a museum in the basement of the Treasury building in Westminster. Previously the Cabinet War Rooms, they’re now a part of the Imperial War Museums collection, hence the badge celebrating the centenary of the original IWM. I’m honestly a little uncomfortable with the weird Churchill-hagiography tone of what used to be a more even-handed exhibition focused on the (extremely cool) set of planning and operations rooms, but whatever gets the punters in.

Background is said Treasury building. Churchill announced Victory in Europe to a cheering crowd from the balcony on the right.

 

#36 MONUMENT TO THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
One of the more handsome custom pins in my collection! Once a major part of the London skyline, now almost totally obscured by the City skyscraper thicket, the Monument was built on the site where the Great Fire of 1666 started.

The backing is the certificate you are awarded for climbing the whole thing… (Fun fact: the inscription at its base originally blamed the Catholics for the fire, a bit of sectarian horror I’m glad we’re mostly past.)

#37 ROYAL ARMOURIES
The unofficial symbol of the Royal Armouries, a totally bizarre grotesque helmet from the early 16th century with horns, spectacles and piercing leer. You can read more about it here: https://royalarmouries.org/stories/our-collection/the-horned-helmet/

The background is a really cool knife my brother gave me, which is honestly the closest thing I have to a sword.

#38 OLD ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE
Originally built as a retirement home for seamen, the Old Royal Naval College is the heart of the maritime Greenwich area (which also contains the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory, and the preserved tea clipper Cutty Sark). It’s also an absolutely magnificent set of buildings in the English Baroque style, including the outstanding Painted Hall (which has now been refurbished – hurrah! – but they now think they’re charging £12 a head to visit what you could just walk into for free – not hurrah.)

#39 DOVER CASTLE
As the closest piece of England to the Continent (and the classic enemy, France,) Dover Castle has been continually fortified and expanded over several thousand years. Pre-Roman earthworks have been found around the site of a still-standing Roman lighthouse; a Plantagenet keep at the heart is nine hundred years old, the immense Napoleonic bastions, Victorian casemates and WW2 ack-ack batteries are more obviously recent additions.
They didn’t have anything specifically Dover-y at the castle, but they did have this handsome little rhomboid tank. Background is a booklet about the Western Heights, a less well known but almost equally impressive agglomerate of fortifications, which until recently was the site of a Home Office immigrant prison camp.

#40 WESTMINSTER ABBEY
Westminster Abbey is one of the best churches in Britain, being absolutely chocka with dead kings and queens, poets and sea-officers. It’s also very near where I work. And yet I never visited until 2017! We fixed that with a visit from my Copenhagen friend, along with a ride on the (now defunct) London DUKWs.

#41 CHATHAM DOCKYARD
Chatham, down among the many low-lying mud-flat spurs of the Thames estuary, was for centuries one of the most important dockyards of the Royal Navy. In the 20th century the increasing size and complexity of capital ships and the confines of the River Medway shifted the dockyard first to escorts and submarines, and ultimately closed it entirely. The historic dockyard there is both a fantastic museum of Warship Stuff and an artifact in its own right, with vast old hangar structures, preserved warships and a line of 18th century fortifications.

#42 KENSINGTON PALACE
Kensington Palace sits at the far west end of the parakeet-infested Hyde Park, not far from Exhibition Road and various Prince Albert themed megastructures. It currently still officially houses Prince William and various pointless minor members of the royal family, but large sections are now a museum run by Historic Royal Palaces.

Its main draw at time of visiting was a Princess Diana fashion show (hard pass), a really excellent William and Mary exhibition, and some Queen Victoria apartments which did their best to ascribe some interesting and dynamic human qualities to Vic but still managed to paint a portrait of a rather sad, boring sex maniac. Lovely palace though.