Tower of London

• 1. Introduction

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  The Tower of London has carried many names, but its full official title tells you almost everything: His Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London. It sits on the north bank of the River Thames, a stone presence that has watched over the city for nearly a thousand years. William the Conqueror founded it toward the end of 1066, within weeks of his victory at the Battle of Hastings. From that moment, whoever held the Tower held a key to England itself.

  In its lifetime, this single complex has served as a palace, an armoury, a treasury, a prison, a place of execution, a mint, a record office, a zoo, and a home for the Crown Jewels. It has been besieged, bombed, and escaped from in spectacular fashion. Its reputation for cruelty is, in many ways, a myth built by propagandists and novelists. The real story is stranger and more layered than the legend. What drove kings to expand it at such enormous cost? Who actually died within its walls, and who merely lived there in comfortable captivity? And how did a medieval fortress become one of the country's most visited attractions, drawing nearly three million visitors in a single year?

• 2. William's White Tower

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  William of Poitiers, the Conqueror's own biographer, recorded that William's first priority after taking London was to "overawe the Londoners". He sent an advance party ahead of him, and the earliest phase of what became the Tower was built onto the south-east corner of the old Roman town walls, using their stonework as ready-made defences. The River Thames guarded the south. A ditch and a timber palisade handled the rest.

  The White Tower itself, the great stone keep at the heart of the complex, was begun in 1078. William placed Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, in charge of its construction. Measuring 36 by 32 metres at the base and rising 27 metres to the southern battlements, it was one of the largest keeps in the Christian world. Military historian R. Allen Brown called it "the donjon par excellence". It housed grand rooms for the king, a chapel on the upper floors, latrines built into the walls, and four fireplaces.

  The main building material was Kentish ragstone, supplemented with Caen stone imported from northern France. Much of that original Caen facing was later replaced with Portland stone in the 17th and 18th centuries. The White Tower is the earliest stone keep in England, and it announced the Norman presence with deliberate visual force. Archaeologist Alan Vince has suggested that the Tower's strongest defences deliberately faced Saxon London, so that the city's inhabitants would never forget who was watching them.

  The tower was probably finished by around 1100, when Bishop Ranulf Flambard became the first recorded prisoner held there. Flambard was loathed across England for the harsh taxes he extracted on the king's behalf. His imprisonment did not last long. On the 2nd of February 1101, he hosted a banquet for his guards, plied them with drink, and then lowered himself by a smuggled rope from a secluded chamber. One contemporary chronicler, astonished by the escape, accused the bishop of witchcraft.

• 3. Fortress and Prison

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  Controlling the Tower meant controlling England. In 1141, during the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, the castle's Constable, Geoffrey de Mandeville, sold his loyalty first to one side and then the other, and through that maneuvering became, according to contemporaries, "the richest and most powerful man in England". When Stephen caught him in secret talks with Matilda a third time, he had Mandeville arrested and stripped of his castles. From that point, the position of Constable was never again hereditary but was kept strictly in the hands of a royal appointee.

  The Tower was besieged multiple times. In 1191, William Longchamp, who had expanded the castle at enormous expense on behalf of King Richard I, surrendered to Prince John after just three days. In 1214, Robert Fitzwalter besieged it while John was at Windsor; the Tower resisted, and the siege ended only when John signed Magna Carta. During the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, a crowd broke into the castle while the king was away meeting Wat Tyler. They looted the Jewel House and dragged the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, from St John's Chapel, where he had taken refuge hoping the mob would respect the sanctuary. He was beheaded on Tower Hill.

  By the 16th and 17th centuries, imprisonment became the Tower's most notorious function. The Privy Council had to sanction the use of torture, so it was applied sparingly; between 1540 and 1640, during the peak of imprisonment at the Tower, there were 48 recorded cases. The three most common methods were the rack, the Scavenger's daughter, and manacles. The rack had been introduced to England in 1447 by the Duke of Exeter, the Constable at the time, and consequently acquired the grim nickname "the Duke of Exeter's daughter". Guy Fawkes was brought to the Tower on the 6th of November 1605; after torture he signed a full confession to the Gunpowder Plot.

  Despite the Tower's fearsome reputation, only seven people were executed within the castle walls before the world wars. Public executions were far more common on Tower Hill, where 112 people were put to death over a period of 400 years. Anne Boleyn was among the seven executed inside. Elizabeth I, before she became queen, was held within the Tower walls under suspicion of rebellion. Walter Raleigh spent years there; his rooms were adapted to accommodate his family, and his son was born at the Tower in 1605.

• 4. The Princes and the Jewels

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  In June 1483, two boys were seen alive in the Tower for the last time. Edward V, aged 12, and his younger brother Richard had been placed there by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while Gloucester was serving as Lord Protector. Within weeks, Gloucester was proclaimed King Richard III. What happened to the boys after that has never been established. Traditional accounts hold that they were murdered in the late summer of 1483. The Bloody Tower acquired its name in the 16th century precisely because it was believed to be the site of their killing.

  In 1674, when a 12th-century forebuilding at the entrance to the White Tower was demolished, bones were discovered at a depth of 10 feet. They were long assumed to belong to the princes. However, a Roman graveyard discovered in 2011 about 12 feet below the Minories, just a few hundred yards away, raises questions about whether those bones were from an entirely earlier era. The mystery has never been resolved.

  The Crown Jewels that rest in the Tower today have their own violent history. In 1649, following the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell ordered the contents of the Jewel House dispersed. Metal items went to the Mint to be melted and reused. The crowns were, in the record's stark phrase, "totallie broken and defaced". When the monarchy was restored in 1660, only a 12th-century spoon and three ceremonial swords had survived. Replacements were made for the coronation of Charles II in 1661, based on drawings from Charles I's time; gems were rented because the treasury could not afford to buy them outright.

  In 1671, Colonel Thomas Blood tried to steal the newly reinstated jewels. He and his accomplices bound and gagged the Jewel House keeper and briefly laid hands on the Imperial State Crown, Sceptre, and Orb before the keeper's son arrived unexpectedly and raised the alarm. Today the display in the Waterloo Block holds 23,578 gemstones, including St Edward's Crown and the Coronation Spoon, the oldest surviving piece at roughly 800 years old.

• 5. The Royal Menagerie

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  Records from 1210 to 1212 show payments to lion keepers at the Tower, and King John is thought to have started the collection. Henry III received three leopards from Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II around 1235. In 1252, the sheriffs were ordered to pay fourpence a day toward the upkeep of a polar bear, a gift from Haakon IV of Norway. The bear attracted considerable attention from Londoners when it fished in the Thames while tethered to the land by a chain.

  In 1254 or 1255, Louis IX of France sent Henry III an African elephant. A wooden structure measuring 12.2 by 6.1 metres was built to house it. The animal died in 1258, possibly because it was given red wine, or possibly because the English climate did not suit it. Matthew Paris depicted the elephant in his Chronica Majora, leaving one of the few contemporary images of the creature.

  Edward I appointed the first official Keeper of the animals in 1288. By the early 18th century, the menagerie was open to the public, with admission priced at three half-pence or, alternatively, a cat or dog to feed to the lions. By the end of that century the price had risen to nine pence. A particularly well-known resident in the early 19th century was Old Martin, a large grizzly bear given to George III by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1811. At its height in 1828, under keeper Alfred Copps, the collection included over 280 animals representing at least 60 species. The Lion Tower, the semi-circular barbican built by Edward I in 1277 that gave the menagerie its home, no longer survives.

• 6. War, Restoration, and Today

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  During the First World War, eleven men were tried privately and shot by firing squad at the Tower for espionage. The Second World War brought Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's deputy, to the castle as a prisoner, though his stay lasted only four days in 1941. The last person to be executed at the Tower was German spy Josef Jakobs, shot on the 15th of August 1941. A prefabricated miniature rifle range in the outer ward served as the execution site; it was demolished in 1969.

  On the 23rd of September 1940, high-explosive bombs struck the castle during the Blitz, destroying several buildings and narrowly missing the White Tower. A 1974 bombing in the White Tower Mortar Room killed one person and injured 41; the police investigated suspicions that the IRA was responsible, but no one claimed the attack.

  After the Second World War, repairs were made and the Tower reopened to the public, continuing a tradition of tourism that stretches back to at least the Elizabethan period. By 1851 a purpose-built ticket office had to be erected to handle the volume of visitors. Since 1990, the site has been managed by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that receives no funding from the government or the Crown. The Tower was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988. In 2025, it received 2,817,852 visitors, making it the ninth most popular tourist attraction in the country.

  At least six ravens are maintained at the Tower at all times, tended by the Ravenmaster, one of the Yeoman Warders, in accordance with the belief that if the ravens ever leave, the kingdom will fall. General Sir Gordon Messenger was appointed Constable of the Tower in 2022, serving the primarily ceremonial five-year term that now defines the role.