Lloyd's of London

Lonely Planet review

While the world's leading insurance brokers are inside underwriting everything from trains, planes and ships to cosmonauts' lives and film stars' legs, people outside still stop to gawp at the stainless steel external ducting and staircases of the Lloyd's of London building. French free climber, or 'spiderman', Alain Robert even felt moved to scale the exterior with his bare hands in 2003.

Lloyd's is the work of Richard Rogers, one of the architects of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and although it was a watershed for London when it was built in 1986, it's since been overtaken by plenty of other stunning architecture throughout the capital. However, its brave-new-world postmodernism still strikes a particular contrast with the olde-worlde Leadenhall Market next door.

While you can watch people whizzing up and down the outside of the building in its all-glass lifts, sadly you can't experience it yourself. Access to the elevators and the rest of the interior is restricted to employees or professional groups, who must book in advance. Some years the Lloyd's building takes part in Open House Weekend, which gives the public very rare access to the inside of the building.