Salisbury Cathedral

When Lincoln and St Paul’s spires collapsed in the 16th century, Salisbury became England’s tallest church spire entirely by accident, 404 feet of limestone that wasn’t originally designed to claim any records. The pillars visibly bend inward under the stress, and Christopher Wren had to install reinforcing tie-beams in 1668 to prevent the whole thing from toppling. Six centuries later, during the pandemic peak in 2021, the cathedral transformed into a vaccination hub for four months, with patients receiving their jabs to the soundtrack of the Father Willis organ while a 1386 faceless clock, rediscovered forgotten in the cathedral’s tower in 1928, ticked away nearby.

Guinness World Records recognises it as the world’s oldest working mechanical clock, a title it has held onto since before the cathedral itself had finished settling into the marsh it was built on. The clock predates the vaccine it kept time for by six hundred years and change, and it will likely still be ticking long after anyone remembers what a pandemic was. Some monuments claim their records on purpose. Salisbury seems to have collected most of its by simply refusing to fall down.