The Tower of London

The White Tower

The great keep was begun around 1078 for William I, with Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, overseeing the work; timber dating points to the second half of the 1070s. It was not finished in his lifetime. His son William II enlarged it to its present size after a storm in 1090, and it was probably complete by about 1100, so accounts crediting William the Conqueror with completing it are wrong by a reign or more. Henry III ordered it whitened inside and out in March 1240, and the name has stuck.

Whether it was ever the tallest building in London is not supportable from any authoritative source, and the claim is best dropped. What can be said, and is better, is what the official descriptions say: Historic England calls it the most complete surviving eleventh-century fortress palace in Europe, and the UNESCO inscription of 1988 describes it as the royal Norman castle par excellence.

Getting round it takes legs. The entrance alone is forty-one steps, the upper floors and basement about two hundred and six more, including a spiral stair of a hundred and one, and the building runs to two hundred and forty-seven steps in all. The lift reaches the ground floor and the basement only, so there is no step-free route to the upper floors.

Prison, mint and record office

The Tower was not built as a prison and never stopped being other things while it served as one. Its first known prisoner was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, held in 1101, who also became its first escapee by climbing from a window on a rope smuggled in a gallon of wine. The prison use ran on, in one form or another, until the Second World War: Guy Fawkes was tortured there in 1605, the last hanging on Tower Hill was in 1780, Rudolf Hess was held there in 1941, and Josef Jakobs was shot by firing squad on 15 August that year, the last execution on the site. The Kray twins were held there in 1952. No official source gives a date on which it ceased to be a prison, because it ended by disuse rather than by decision.

Alongside that it held the London Mint from 1279 until 1812 — Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint in 1696 — the public records, an arsenal, and the regalia. Chaucer, as clerk of the king's works, oversaw the completion of Tower Wharf in 1389. Edward I built St Thomas's Tower and the watergate now known as Traitors' Gate between 1275 and 1279.

The menagerie

Henry III was sent three cats, recorded as leopards, by the Emperor Frederick II in 1235, and a royal menagerie grew from them: a polar bear in the early 1250s and an elephant in 1255, a gift from the King of France. It lasted six centuries. William IV ordered it out in 1831, the Duke of Wellington having argued that the Tower should be a royal fortress and not a public exhibition. The first animals went to the Zoological Society's gardens in Regent's Park on 30 December 1831, the rest followed in 1832, and the remainder had been sold off to zoos and travelling circuses by October 1835. The Lion Tower was demolished afterwards.

It is often said that the Tower's menagerie became London Zoo. That is too strong. The Zoological Society was founded in 1826, its gardens opened in 1828, and it had already been given the royal menagerie at Windsor in 1830 — so the zoo existed before the Tower animals arrived. What is accurate is that the Tower held London's first zoo, and that its animals went into the collection that became the one in Regent's Park.

The observatory that was never built

Accounts of the Tower frequently credit it with an observatory built in 1675. No observatory was ever built there. What happened is better. John Flamsteed was appointed astronomical observator by royal warrant in March 1675 and made his first recorded observation on 18 April from the circular north-east turret of the White Tower — a stair turret of about 1097, since named the Flamsteed Tower after him. He worked from the top chamber for roughly six months, carrying his own instruments up, with no alteration made to the building. In August 1675 he laid the foundation stone of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The 1675 date belongs to his warrant and to Greenwich; the Tower's part was a makeshift arrangement lasting half a year.

The Crown Jewels

The single most important fact about the regalia is that most of it is not old. Parliament ordered the medieval coronation ornaments broken up and melted in 1649, and the gold was struck into coin; of the whole medieval collection only the Coronation Spoon survives. What is displayed was made for the coronation of Charles II in 1661 or added since, St Edward's Crown among it. Thomas Blood very nearly stole it in 1671, and some pieces still carry the damage from his attempt.

The jewels have moved about the site repeatedly — a chamber in the Martin Tower from 1669, one in the Wakefield Tower from 1868, and the Waterloo Block since 1967, where the present Jewel House is. The display inside it was rebuilt over four years and reopened on 26 May 2023, three weeks after the coronation, so any description of the previous arrangement is out of date. It now opens with the empty frames of the state crowns of George I, George IV and Victoria, which shows how the same stones were reset from reign to reign; it devotes a section to the Koh-i-Noor as an object of conquest, tracing its Mughal, Iranian, Afghan and Sikh owners; and it shows, for the first time, the hammer and knife used to make the first cuts in the Cullinan diamond.

Three famous stones are routinely described wrongly, and all three can be stated exactly. Cullinan II, of 317.4 carats, sits at the front of the band of the Imperial State Crown, which was made by Garrard in 1937 for the coronation of George VI and whose arches were lowered for Elizabeth II in 1953. The stone entered that line of crowns in 1909, when the Stuart Sapphire was shifted to the back of the band to make room. It cannot have been in a crown used by Victoria, because the diamond was not found until 1905; what was made for her coronation in 1838 was a separate and lighter Imperial State Crown, by Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, whose frame is one of those now on show.

The Koh-i-Noor weighs 105.60 carats. It reached England in 1850 at 186 old carats, poorly cut with a flat base and mounted in an armlet, and was recut in 1852 at Prince Albert's urging — so figures above two hundred carats belong to an earlier Indian weight and describe neither the stone today nor the stone that arrived. It is set in the crown made for Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother in 1937, and was not used at the coronation in May 2023; Queen Mary's crown of 1911 was altered instead, its eight arches reduced to four and the Cullinan III, IV and V diamonds set into it.

Cullinan I, the Great Star of Africa, is 530.2 carats and is held in a heart-shaped mount in the Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross, which was made in 1661 and altered in 1910 to take it. It was cut from a rough stone of 3,106 carats found in South Africa in 1905, the largest gem-quality uncut diamond ever found, which yielded nine major stones and ninety-six smaller brilliants.

The armouries

The Royal Armouries traces its own origins at the Tower to July 1323, when a keeper of part of the king's wardrobe was appointed. Public display began after the Restoration: two permanent displays were set up and paying visitors admitted in 1660, and the Line of Kings — armoured figures on horseback representing the kings of England — is first recorded in an inventory of October 1660. It moved in 1825 into the New Horse Armoury, the Tower's first purpose-built gallery, and was redesigned again in 2013. Admission was cut from three shillings to one in 1838 and to sixpence the following year, and attendance went from about ten thousand a year to eighty thousand.

Whether this makes it the oldest public museum in Britain is a claim worth handling carefully. It is recorded as such in one reference work, dating the claim to 1660, and appears on one of the Royal Armouries' own story pages; the institution's formal history does not make it, and claims 1323 for its origins instead.

What is at the Tower now is a display, not the national collection. A decision taken in 1990 moved the bulk of the collection north: the Royal Armouries Museum at Leeds opened on 30 March 1996 and holds the majority, with around six thousand objects shown across five galleries, while the national artillery collection went to Fort Nelson on Portsdown Hill, opened in 1995. The whole collection across the three sites runs to some seventy thousand items, so accounts crediting the Tower alone with forty thousand on display are impossible; no object count is published for the Tower at all. What the White Tower does hold is a small group of exceptional things, including two armours made for Henry VIII at Greenwich — one silvered and engraved of about 1515, one for field and tournament of 1540 — the Japanese armour given to James VI and I, the cuirassier armour of Charles I of 1612, and an armour made for a boy, probably Henry, Prince of Wales.

Torture, and the making of a reputation

Torture was ordered at the Tower on a number of occasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and many prisoners were held in isolation and worked on psychologically. No official source gives any figure for how often, and the custodians themselves now ask publicly how much of the Tower's reputation for it is a fabrication.

The display called Torture at the Tower, in the Lower Wakefield Tower, holds replicas rather than original instruments: a rack, a version of the Scavenger's Daughter, which held the body doubled up, and manacles, explained through the account of the Jesuit priest John Gerard, who was hung by the wrists. There is a more elaborate Scavenger's Daughter elsewhere in the White Tower. Claims about bloodstained stones have no basis of any kind and appear nowhere in the official material.

Where the reputation came from is itself part of the history. After 1660 the Tower armouries ran a display called the Spanish Armoury, a collection of fearsome weapons and instruments of torture said to have been taken from the Armada of 1588. Few of the objects had any Spanish connection. A visitor attraction of the 1660s is a good deal of the reason the Tower and torture are joined in the public mind.

The Yeomen Warders and the ravens

The Warders descend from the Yeomen of the Guard, founded by Henry VII in 1485, and became a separate body at the Tower under Henry VIII, when a detachment stayed behind as a garrison after he moved his residence out. Official sources disagree with each other about which of the two kings to credit, so the descent is the safer form.

The scarlet and gold that everyone pictures is State Dress, worn on ceremonial occasions. The everyday uniform, and the one visitors actually see, is the nineteenth-century Blue Undress; its cyphers were changed from the late Queen's to the King's from 24 April 2023. A Warder must have served at least twenty-two years in the armed forces, reached Warrant Officer or the equivalent, and hold the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal.

The ravens are a matter of attributed tradition rather than record: it is said that the Tower and the kingdom will fall if they leave, and Charles II is thought to have been the first to order their protection. At least six are kept, with spares, in the care of a Warder appointed Ravenmaster; they are lodged on the South Lawn, hold territories inside the walls, and have some flight feathers trimmed to keep them from going far.

The moat

There was a ditch on the north and west sides from 1078. Henry III began a moat surrounding the whole Tower in the 1240s, and in the 1270s Edward I dug a deep one at least fifty metres wide, with sluices controlling the river; its shape is the one still visible, and young pike were being farmed in it by 1292. An outbreak of infection blamed on the smell led the Duke of Wellington, as Constable, to have it drained from 1843, and it has been dry ever since apart from accidental flooding.

That may change. In July 2026 the local authority granted permission to return water to the moat for the first time since the 1840s, in the form of wetlands, ponds, rain gardens and meadow, with memorials to both world wars on the north side and a learning pond for school visits on the east. The case rested partly on the 2022 Superbloom, whose irrigation ran dry in that summer's heatwave and hosepipe ban. No construction timetable, completion date or cost has been published.

Lately, and what is announced

The moat has carried the Tower's best-known modern events. In 2014, between 17 July and Armistice Day, it was filled with 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each British and Colonial military death of the First World War; in November 2018 thousands of flames were lit in it on eight successive evenings; and in 2022 it was sown with some twenty million seeds of twenty-nine species for the Platinum Jubilee. Wire sculptures of the menagerie animals, commissioned in 2010, stand about the site.

The most substantial recent change indoors is the Medieval Palace, which reopened on 24 May 2025 after refurbishment, covering St Thomas's, Wakefield and Lanthorn Towers with Edward I's bedchamber recreated, and including for the first time in that part of the Tower the story of medieval London's Jewish community, with a mikveh stone of about 1200 on loan. A programme announced in July 2026 is to add learning and community buildings, among them an archive study centre opening more than twenty-five thousand architectural drawings of the Tower to the public for the first time; fundraising continues and no opening dates have been published. Conservation of the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula is continuing, also without a published reopening date.