In July 2012 the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of a Higgs boson, confirming the conjecture put forward by Tom Kibble and others in the 1960s. This article will attempt to outline some of the challenges faced during the construction of the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments, their operation and performance, and selected physics results. In particular, results relating to the new heavy boson will be discussed as well as its properties and the future prospects for the LHC programme.