London, England
Tower of London
A castle begun by a conqueror to frighten a city, and used for nine hundred years as palace, prison, mint, zoo, armoury and safe. The crowns are still kept here. So are six ravens, on which, it is said, the kingdom depends.
Photo: Rafa Esteve, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are inside two rings of stone wall, on a lawn. In front of you stands a square keep of pale stone, as high as a nine-storey building, with a turret at each corner. Big black birds walk on the grass. Behind the walls are glass office towers.
The keep was begun about 1078. In China it was the Northern Song (960–1127): the poet Su Shi was in his forties, and the reforms of Wang Anshi were dividing the court at Kaifeng.
One ticket covers everything inside the walls, including the Crown Jewels. The only thing sold separately is the locking-up ceremony at night.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The White Tower: armours and the Norman chapel | Included |
| The Crown Jewels | Included; queue inside |
| Traitors' Gate and the medieval palace | Included |
| The Bloody Tower | Included |
| Tower Green and the Chapel of St Peter | Included; the chapel on a Yeoman Warder tour, or in the last hour |
| The Beauchamp Tower | Included |
| The wall walk | Included |
| The Fusilier Museum and the Royal Mint exhibition | Included |
| The Ceremony of the Keys, at 21:30 | Separate ticket, 10 pounds, booked ahead |
| The scaffold site on Tower Hill, outside the walls | Free |
In 1066 William, Duke of Normandy, crossed the sea, killed the English king in battle and was crowned in London. He did not trust the Londoners. He built this tower inside the corner of the old Roman city wall, in stone brought from Normandy, to overawe them.
Later kings added the two rings of wall and a moat, and lived here in times of trouble. It was the strongest box in the kingdom, so everything valuable was put in it: the coinage, the weapons, the records, the crowns, and people the king wanted kept.
Most prisoners walked out again. A few did not. On the green to your left, seven people were beheaded in private, three of them queens of England.
Before you leave, look at the ravens. By tradition there must always be six.
"It is one tower." It is a castle with twenty-one towers on seven hectares. "The Tower" is the old name for the keep in the middle, and it stuck to the whole.
"The bridge with two towers is part of it." That is Tower Bridge, opened in 1894 and named after the castle beside it.
"Thousands were executed here." Over four centuries about a hundred and twenty prisoners of the Tower were put to death, nearly all on the hill outside, in public. More people were shot inside the walls as spies in the two world wars than were ever beheaded on the green.
"The Beefeaters are actors." They are Yeoman Warders, retired soldiers with at least twenty-two years' service, and they live inside the walls with their families.
"The Crown Jewels are medieval." Parliament melted the old ones down in 1649 after it cut off the king's head. Nearly everything on show was made new for the next king in 1661.
The stops begin at the river, where prisoners arrived, and end on the walls.
Edward I built this water gate in the 1270s as his private entrance from the river, with his own rooms above it. Two centuries later it was the way prisoners came in. They were rowed down from Westminster after trial, under London Bridge, where the heads of earlier traitors were set on poles.
Climb the stairs beside it. The rooms have been fitted out as the king's bedroom and hall of about 1280, with painted walls and a great bed, to show that this was a palace before it was a prison.
In 1483 the boy king Edward V, aged twelve, and his brother, aged nine, were lodged here by their uncle, who then took the throne as Richard III. They were seen playing in the garden, then at the windows, then not at all.
Sir Walter Raleigh, the explorer who had founded the first English colony in America, spent thirteen years in these rooms from 1603. He had his wife and son with him, grew tobacco on the green, made medicines in a shed and wrote a history of the world.
The keep is 27 metres high, with walls more than four metres thick at the base. The door is on the first floor, reached by a wooden stair that could be pulled away. In 1240 Henry III had the whole building whitewashed, and the name has lasted.
Inside are the royal armours. Look for the suit made for Henry VIII in 1540, when he was forty-nine and very large, and for a Japanese armour sent to King James I by the shogun in 1613.
A row of wooden horses carries the armour of the kings. It was first set up in the 1650s for visitors who paid to see it, which makes it one of the oldest museum displays in the world.
On the second floor is a chapel of about 1080, hardly changed. Thick round columns carry plain round arches, and a gallery runs above. There is no decoration. It is the oldest church interior in London.
Kings prayed here the night before they were crowned. In 1503 the body of Elizabeth of York, queen of Henry VII, lay here surrounded by eight hundred candles.
The jewels are in the long building on the north side, behind steel doors, and you pass the crowns on a moving floor. Photography is not allowed.
St Edward's Crown, of solid gold, weighs more than two kilograms and is used only at the moment of crowning. It was last placed on a head on 6 May 2023. The Imperial State Crown, which the monarch wears to open Parliament, is set with 2,868 diamonds.
The sceptre holds the largest clear cut diamond in the world, 530 carats, cut from a stone found in South Africa in 1905. Another crown holds the Koh-i-Noor, taken from the Punjab in 1849; India, Pakistan and others have asked for it back.
In 1671 an Irish adventurer called Colonel Blood, disguised as a clergyman, knocked the keeper on the head, flattened the crown with a mallet and got as far as the wharf. The king pardoned him and gave him a pension. Nobody knows why.
The glass cushion marks the place of private execution, kept for prisoners whose death in public might cause trouble. Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, died here on 19 May 1536. A swordsman was brought from France to do it with one stroke.
Catherine Howard, his fifth wife, followed in 1542. Lady Jane Grey, a Protestant girl of sixteen who had been proclaimed queen for nine days, was beheaded here in 1554.
All three lie under the floor of the small chapel beside the green, with two dukes, a cardinal and Sir Thomas More. Their bones were found in 1876 when the floor was relaid. A historian called it the saddest spot on earth.
Prisoners of rank were held in this tower on the west side of the green, and they had time. The walls of the first-floor room are covered with what they cut into the stone: names, dates, coats of arms, prayers and puzzles.
One word, IANE, appears twice. Tradition says it was cut by Lady Jane Grey's young husband, held here while she was held next door.
You can walk the inner wall from tower to tower. From the north side the keep stands against the glass towers of the City, the financial district that grew up where William's Londoners lived.
The moat below was drained in 1843 because it stank. In the Second World War it was dug up for vegetables. In 2014 it was filled with 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each soldier of Britain and its empire killed in the First World War.
The ravens live in cages by the south wall and are let out by day. A Yeoman Warder called the Ravenmaster feeds them raw meat and biscuits soaked in blood. Their flight feathers are trimmed a little, so they can fly but prefer not to go far.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| about 1078 | William the Conqueror begins the White Tower | Northern Song China: Su Shi is writing; Kaifeng is the largest city in the world |
| 1240 | Henry III whitewashes the keep; he already keeps leopards here, and a polar bear will follow | The Mongols take Kiev; the Southern Song (1127–1279) holds south China |
| 1483 | The two princes disappear | The Ming (1368–1644) dynasty under the Chenghua emperor; Leonardo paints in Milan |
| 1536 | Anne Boleyn is beheaded | The Jiajing emperor reigns; Michelangelo begins the Last Judgement |
| 1671 | Colonel Blood tries to steal the crown | The tenth year of Kangxi; Louis XIV is building Versailles |
| 1696 | Isaac Newton takes charge of the Mint | Kangxi leads an army into Mongolia; Peter the Great rules Russia |
| 1841 | Fire destroys the great storehouse of arms | The First Opium War; Hong Kong island is occupied |
| 1941 | The last execution: a German spy is shot | The Second World War; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor in December |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
If the ravens ever leave the Tower, the White Tower will fall and the kingdom with it. King Charles II was warned of this and ordered that six must always be kept.
Source: Told by the Yeoman Warders; the first written mention of ravens kept here is of 1883
The ghost of Anne Boleyn walks from the Queen's House to the chapel on the night of her death, carrying her head under her arm. A sentry who challenged the figure in 1864 and fainted when his bayonet passed through it was let off by a court martial.
Source: A Tower tradition since the nineteenth century, printed in many guidebooks
The king of Norway sent Henry III a white bear. It was kept on a long chain so that it could walk down to the Thames and catch its own fish.
Source: This one is true: the order to the sheriffs of London for the chain and a muzzle survives, dated 1252
Every night at seven minutes to ten the chief warder locks the gates and is challenged by a sentry: "Halt! Who comes there?" "The keys." "Whose keys?" "King Charles's keys." "Pass, King Charles's keys. All's well." It is said never to have been missed in seven hundred years, and to have been late only once, in an air raid in 1940.
Source: The Tower's own account of the Ceremony of the Keys
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The Tower's own site (Historic Royal Palaces, hrp.org.uk), ticket and visiting pages as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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