It's one of the most iconic images of Game of Thrones - that famous Iron Throne that so many long to sit in. Turns out though, it's the wrong bloody chair! Well, it's certainly not what author George RR Martin envisioned writing the books.

We all know that the throne is forged from a 1000 swords (obvs), and that whoever sits on it is in fact the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms, but the version in the HBO TV series is really not quite as impressive as George had in mind.

While speaking at a panel in New York on Sunday evening about his new book 'The World of Ice & Fire', Martin said; "Nobody ever got it right. There were comic book versions, and there were versions in the card game and the board game, and there were versions on the cover [of books], and there were versions that were done for conventions. The very first ... there was a wooden one that I sat on in 1996 ... but none of them were ever really right."

However one person has come closest to replicating the Iron Throne of his imagination - French artist Marc Simonetti. He worked with Martin to make an exact replica of the throne, albeit, in a painting and not as an actual structure, and there it is below!

Pretty damn terrifying looking, in fairness.

Martin described how it was supposed to look; "I said repeatedly the Iron Throne is huge. It towers over the room like a great beast. And it's ugly. It's asymmetric. It's put together by blacksmiths not by craftsmen and experts in furniture manufacturing. You have to walk the iron steps and when a king sits on it he's like 10 feet above everybody else ... He's in this raised position looking down on everyone."

He also said though that he thought the HBO version was terrific and it's not something he blames the network for. In fact he's not sure how viable his vision would have even been; "The thrones they have are enormously large and cumbersome to move and expensive to build," said Martin. "To build this monstrosity, would blow the budget of an entire episode and it wouldn’t fit in the set."

"Our program is in the Paint Hall in Belfast in Northern Ireland," he added. "The Paint Hall is the largest sound stage in Europe. It [was] originally part of the old Portland Wolff shipyard where they built the Titanic. … We’ve divided it into a number of pods and our throne room is in one of them. It’s a very large set, but it’s not large enough."

There is one place he had in mind for it to fit though; "If they would give us St. Paul’s cathedral … after a year, build a giant throne like that and dominate the entire thing, go halfway to the ceiling, then you could get the Iron Throne the way it’s described in the book," said Martin. "This is the difference between books and television."

So there you are, eh London, sort it out, will you?

(Image is from The World of Ice and Fire)