London, United Kingdom, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Big Ben anchors the London week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the London puzzle set.
In the 1200s, it was common to see a polar bear swimming and fishing in the Thames. King Henry III kept an exotic menagerie at the Tower of London, and the polar bear — a gift from the King of Norway — was allowed to hunt for fish in the river on a long chain.
Source: heritagecalling.comThe London Underground has its own unique subspecies of mosquito, Culex pipiens molestus, which became famous when it feasted on Londoners sheltering from German bombs in the Tube tunnels during WWII. Recent DNA analysis revealed the mosquito actually evolved in ancient Egypt around 2,000 years ago — not in the Underground as long believed.
Source: Natural History Museum 2025, Nature, SmithsonianThe Great Stink of 1858 changed history: the smell of human sewage in the Thames became so unbearable that Parliament hung lime-soaked curtains over windows and considered relocating. The crisis finally forced the government to fund Joseph Bazalgette's revolutionary sewer system.
Source: Historic England, Science MuseumBazalgette's Victorian sewer system required 318 million bricks, replaced 150 miles of old sewers, and built over 1,000 miles of new ones — all completed in under a decade starting in 1859. His work ended London's cholera epidemics and is thought to have saved more lives than any other Victorian official's efforts.
Source: Historic England, heritagecalling.comA mass grave of up to 50,000 Black Death victims was discovered in 2013 beneath Charterhouse Square in Farringdon, just 8 feet below the surface. The Piccadilly Line reportedly curves under Hyde Park specifically to avoid a massive plague pit.
Source: Atlas Obscura, Historic UK