Culture & History

Museums, monuments, memorials and the stories behind ordinary-looking corners.

Collections

• Baden-Württemberg's palaces the state palace administration keeps — When the monarchies of Baden and Württemberg ended, their residences did not go to heirs or buyers: they stayed with the state, and a publi…
• Christopher Wren's churches in the City of London — Fifty-two parish churches went up in the City after the Fire of 1666 under Wren's office, and what is left of them is not one thing: some a…
• The royal palaces Historic Royal Palaces looks after — Six palaces the Crown no longer occupies, handed to a Royal Charter body with charitable status that takes no money from the government or…
• Tarraco's Roman monuments on the World Heritage list, in and around Tarragona — UNESCO inscribed the Archaeological Ensemble of Tarraco at its 24th session in 2000, under criteria (ii) and (iii), as a single property of…
• Jean Nouvel's buildings in Paris — Nouvel has been building in Paris for four decades, from the moucharabieh façade that made his name in 1987 to the Palais-Royal rooms he re…
• Venice's civic museums, the Fondazione Musei Civici — Venice handed its museums to a single participating foundation on 3 March 2008, with the City of Venice as the only founding member, and th…
• Arles's Roman and Romanesque monuments on the World Heritage list — In 1981 UNESCO inscribed not a town but a set of specific coordinates in Arles, and the nomination file names them one by one: an amphithea…
• Carlo Scarpa's buildings in the Veneto — Almost everything Scarpa built stands within an hour or two of Venice, and the Veneto examples cover the whole range of what he did: a ceme…
• The Potsdam palaces the Prussian Palaces foundation keeps — When the two halves of the old Prussian palaces administration were stitched back together by state treaty on 1 January 1995, the new found…
• Luis Barragán's buildings in and around Mexico City — Barragán left only a few dozen finished works, almost all of them in Mexico, and the ones reachable from Mexico City range from a World Her…
• Nicholas Hawksmoor's London churches — Parliament's Act of May 1711 funded fifty new churches out of a tax on coal, and it put Nicholas Hawksmoor in as surveyor to the commission…
• Cologne's great Romanesque churches, the ones the Förderverein keeps — A private association founded in 1981 took on the upkeep of the churches Cologne built between 1000 and 1250, and the repair of the war dam…
• The Paris Musées, the museums the City of Paris runs itself — Fourteen museums in Paris belong to the city rather than the state, pooled since 2013 into a single public body that handles their collecti…
• The houses of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar — Six buildings held by Germany's second-largest cultural foundation, which inherited them from an East German memorial authority that had it…
• Basel's museums — Basel keeps nearly forty museums for fewer than 200,000 residents, and the city's own register quietly explains why so many of them share t…
• Milan's civic museums — Milan's municipal collections are not a single building but a network the Comune owns and staffs: eight museums inside the Castello Sforzes…
• The museums and monuments of Ghent's CityCard — Ghent's CityCard bundles its free entries into one list that mixes working museums with buildings you visit for the rooms alone, and the ad…
• Germany's nuclear power stations being taken apart — Germany switched off its last reactors in April 2023, but the licences that matter now are the ones that let an operator take a reactor apa…
• Britain's surviving Victorian-style Turkish baths — Malcolm Shifrin's Victorian Turkish Baths project counts eleven Victorian and Victorian-style hot-air baths still open anywhere in the Brit…
• The Dresden museums of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen — Saxony's electors began assembling these holdings in the 16th century, and the state collection that grew out of them marked its 450th anni…
• Johannesburg's museums — Johannesburg's museum map is being rearranged while you look at it. The University of the Witwatersrand announced in September 2026 that it…
• The bridges over the Thames inside London — Two systems hold up the crossings between Hampton Court and Tower Bridge. One is an 11th-century endowment that spends around £30 million a…
• The houses of Berlin's Staatliche Museen — Fifteen collections and four research institutes are spread across five Berlin locations under the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, which…
• Frankfurt's Museumsufer museums — Nine museums stand shoulder to shoulder on the Schaumainkai between the Alte Brücke and the Friedensbrücke, and around thirty more Frankfur…
• Amsterdam School buildings — Between about 1910 and 1930, Amsterdam's housing associations and municipal building service handed their commissions to a group of archite…
• Roman London you can still see — Most of what survives of Londinium sits a level or two below the modern street: under an office block on Lower Thames Street, beneath Bloom…
• Porto's buildings faced in azulejos — Porto's tiled fronts are mostly newer than the buildings behind them. A 1739 church received its 11,000 tiles in 1932, a chapel on Santa Ca…
• Otto Wagner's Stadtbahn stations in Vienna — The Stadtbahn opened in 1898, and Otto Wagner designed its station buildings and bridges, from the white pavilions over the regulated Wien…
• The Berlin Wall's designated border crossings — From 1961 to 1989, anyone crossing between the two halves of Berlin, or between West Berlin and the rest of West Germany, had to use one of…
• The Ljubljana works of Jože Plečnik — Between the wars Jože Plečnik reworked the public spaces of his home city with modest means, adding to what was already there rather than c…
• Genoa's Rolli palaces — The Rolli were the Republic of Genoa's official registers of private palaces whose owners could be required to lodge visiting state guests,…
• The bridges over the Douro at Porto — Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia face each other across a deep Douro gorge, and each crossing here was built because the one before it could no…
• The bridges over the Seine inside Paris — Every crossing here is dated, and the dates are the point: a toll bridge for carrying the sick to the Hôtel-Dieu, a span built to move crow…
• Oscar Niemeyer's buildings in Brasília — Between 1956 and his death in 2012, Oscar Niemeyer drew almost every civic building that gives the Brazilian capital its silhouette, from t…
• The anchor points of the Ruhr's Route der Industriekultur — Coke, pig iron, coal, electricity and beer all stopped being made at these sites, and the Regionalverband Ruhr then designated them the loa…
• Berlin's Modernism housing estates on the World Heritage list — Six Berlin estates went onto the World Heritage list in 2008 as "Siedlungen der Berliner Moderne", and a seventh, the Waldsiedlung Zehlendo…
• The Paris locations of Amélie — Jean-Pierre Jeunet shot Amélie across a real city and then repainted it, so the addresses below are genuine while the film's version of the…
• The Los Angeles locations of La La Land — Damien Chazelle shot his 2016 musical almost entirely on public ground: a county park, a funicular the crew had to repair before it would r…
• The Vienna locations of Before Sunrise — Richard Linklater shot the whole of one night in Vienna in 1994, mostly on public ground: a footbridge, a tram ride, a lane between two hou…
• The Bruges locations of In Bruges — Martin McDonagh shot In Bruges in the historic centre between 2 February and 28 March 2007, for a story set in December, which is why the C…
• The San Francisco locations of Hitchcock's Vertigo — Hitchcock shot the exteriors of Vertigo in sixteen days in 1957, then built the interiors on soundstages, so what survives in San Francisco…
• Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in Los Angeles — Between 1919 and 1939 Wright built a handful of houses across Los Angeles, four of them tests of a patented concrete block system that his…
• Portland's bridges over the Willamette — Twelve spans cross the Willamette inside Portland, and no two of them are alike: a 1908 railway swing span rebuilt as a vertical lift, the…
• Louis Sullivan's buildings standing in Chicago — Adler and Sullivan built more than a hundred projects in fourteen years, and Chicago demolished a great many of them: the Stock Exchange, t…
• Savannah's squares, the ones the Oglethorpe plan laid out — In 1733 the new colony's ground was laid out in wards, each built around an open square with trust lots for civic buildings on two sides an…
• Presidents' homes and birthplaces the National Park Service keeps — Federal custody is what these addresses have in common: a family kept a house standing, or gave it away, and Congress or a president's proc…
• Prague's bridges over the Vltava — From the stone laid for Charles IV in 1357 to a footbridge finished in 2020 to replace one that fell into the river, the Vltava crossings r…
• Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings in Oak Park — Oak Park holds the densest concentration of Frank Lloyd Wright's early work anywhere, and most of it is still lived in. This gathering foll…
• The bridges over the Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead — Seven crossings within about a mile of river, built across 135 years and still all in service: a Victorian double-decker carrying trains ov…
• Berlin's rubble mountains, the Truemmerberge — Berlin was flat until the bombing stopped. Between 1946 and the early 1980s the city moved something like 55 million cubic metres of broken…

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