London Stone is a surviving fragment of a much larger stone that once stood on the south side of Candlewick Street, now Cannon Street. The name was first recorded around 1100, and Wikipedia says its date and purpose are unknown and that modern claims that it was an object of veneration or has occult significance are unsubstantiated. John Stow described it in 1598 as a great stone fixed deep in the ground with iron bars.
The best known story is the omen: that if London Stone is ever moved the city will no longer flourish. Londonist's tube map notes that the stone was temporarily moved to the Museum of London in May 2016, a month before the Brexit vote, and invites the reader to draw their own conclusions. The associated rhyme is So long as the Stone of Brutus is safe, so long shall London flourish.
Wikipedia is blunt about the rhyme's age. It says a writer in 1862 quoted it as an ancient proverb, but the Stone of Brutus idea, in which the stone is the altar of Brutus of Troy's Temple of Diana, and the verse itself can be found nowhere earlier than the writings of Richard Williams Morgan, an eccentric Welsh clergyman, and are probably his invention. Other legends, such as Jack Cade striking it with his sword in 1450 or it being a druidic index stone, are similarly unsupported.
The record therefore documents a living piece of London folklore with a traced literary origin. The stone itself is real and publicly viewable in its present home on Cannon Street.
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