Cleopatra's Needle

London's Cleopatra's Needle is a 21-metre red-granite obelisk from ancient Egypt that now stands on the Victoria Embankment between Embankment station and the Golden Jubilee Bridges. Pharaoh Thutmose III had it erected at Heliopolis around 1450 BC; Ramses II added further inscriptions two centuries later. The obelisk has nothing to do with Cleopatra. Muhammad Ali Pasha gifted it to the British Empire in 1820 in thanks for the Battle of the Nile, but it only reached London in 1878 in a purpose-built cigar-shaped pontoon called Cleopatra; six sailors drowned in a Biscay storm during the voyage. At its base sit two ostensibly Egyptian bronze sphinxes that were actually designed in Victorian London and face the wrong way, inward rather than out. A time capsule in the plinth holds newspapers, railway plans and photographs of twelve highly respectable British women of the day.