History of the Tower of London

Few buildings carry as much English history as the Tower of London. For nearly a thousand years it has been a royal fortress and a royal palace, a prison and a place of execution, a treasury, a mint and even a zoo. Understanding how those roles overlapped is the key to understanding the site you walk through today.

A Norman fortress, begun around 1078

The Tower began with William the Conqueror. Having taken England in 1066, he raised a great stone keep beside the Thames around 1078 to overawe the City of London and guard the river approach to it. That keep is the White Tower, and it gave the whole castle its name. Its walls, up to fifteen feet thick in places, were a statement of Norman power as much as a defence.

Expansion in the Middle Ages

Later kings turned the single keep into a concentric fortress. In the thirteenth century Henry III and his son Edward I added two rings of curtain walls, a broad moat, and the watergate now known as Traitors' Gate. Henry III also kept exotic animals here, founding the Royal Menagerie that would remain for six centuries. By the end of the medieval period the Tower was a working royal palace, a secure treasury and the home of the Royal Mint, which struck the nation's coins here for some five hundred years.

The Tudor Tower: prison and scaffold

It is the Tudor century that gave the Tower its dark reputation. Under Henry VIII and his children the fortress became the most feared prison in the land, and Tower Green the scaffold for those too dangerous or too royal to execute in public. Three English queens died within the walls: Anne Boleyn in 1536, Catherine Howard in 1542, and the nine-day queen Lady Jane Grey in 1554. Sir Thomas More was held and executed here, and so were countless others whose only crime was to be on the losing side of a Tudor power struggle. Many lie in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula on the Green.

The Crown Jewels and the Restoration

The Tower's role as a treasury became permanent after the Restoration of 1660. The medieval regalia had been broken up and melted down under Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I, so a new set of coronation regalia was made for Charles II from 1661, including the St Edward's Crown still used to crown monarchs today. That collection, the Crown Jewels, has been guarded and displayed at the Tower ever since, and remains in use — most recently at the coronation of King Charles III in 2023.

The Tower in the modern age

The nineteenth century saw the Tower shed its working roles. The Royal Mint moved out in the 1810s, and in 1835 the Royal Menagerie's animals were transferred to the new London Zoo. The moat was drained in the 1840s. Yet the Tower never quite stopped being a prison: German spies were held and shot here during the First World War, Rudolf Hess was briefly detained in 1941, and the very last prisoners were the Kray twins, held for a few days in 1952. Today the Tower is cared for by the charity Historic Royal Palaces and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988.

To see where all of this happened, start with the layout of the Tower and the quick facts, then plan the practical side of a visit on the visitor guide.