Oxford University's stateliest library seems designed to make students truly feel the weight of knowledge.

One of Europe's oldest libraries.

Its collection includes a broad array of social, geographic, graphic design, and political history.

The ritual has been performed uninterrupted for nearly 700 years.

London's marvelous wildfowl reserve along the Thames.

The Art Deco artwork depicts gilded carriers of deadly illnesses.

A wonderfully eclectic Victorian aquarium lies in the basement of the Horniman Museum.

The majority of the museum's large collection is held in a storage space open to the public a few times a year.

This elaborate Byzantine-style building was designed for a not-so-pretty purpose.

Explore nearly 400 years of English middle-class home life.

This beautiful Victorian ironwork masterpiece was built to keep London from smelling like poop.

Remnants of cells from the most notorious London prison may lie in the basement of a rare Victorian Gin Palace.

This hidden green space is the city's second largest conservatory.

A hidden treasure in London with a rich medieval history, and the resting place of many luminaries.

London's old-school healing garden.

A cluttered and astounding collection of antiquities and curiosities.

A Victorian natural history and ethnographic museum with wonderful turn-of-the-century, science-book-esque evolution displays.

The largest of London's subterranean rivers and once a mad, bad center of London life.

The anatomical-pathological collection of a man who changed surgery.

A historic house left in "dramatic still life."

Rebuilt remains of a temple to Roman god Mithras.

An unusual round church in London with a Templar past.

An easily overlooked stretch of ornate window fronts and gaslight lamps that could be right from the pages of Dickens.

Winding paths and ramshackle mausoleums in the oldest "park cemetery" in London.