The London street bollards that are old cannons

Wandering around London and indeed many other British coastal cities you might from time to time come across rather strange looking bollards to stop people driving on pavements or generally just closing off areas to make them for pedestrians only.

Plenty though by all means not all are actually old Royal Navy cannons with a ball welded into the mouth of the gun to stop anyone getting ideas of using it themselves for nefarious means.

At one point the Royal Navy had around 1,400 ships and most of these had dozens and dozens of cannons but when iron hulled ships were introduced then a lot of these ships became superfluous and the cannons surplus to requirement.

If you know where to look, they are all over the place and from different eras though many of them are from around the Battle of Trafalgar.

Not all of my tourists quite believe they are cannons. I don’t think they are of the opinion that I’m lying because there are far more implausible but true things to see in London but they just don’t always seem that convinced.

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