The White Tower is one of the iconic sights of London. Built by William the Conqueror, or at least under his orders as I doubt he did much stonework himself, the castle must have dominated the early medieval city. It served as a palace, mint and prison as well as defensive structure. The Tower of London hosts a variety of displays and exhibitions inside including the armoury inside the main tower and the crown jewels.
Visiting
We stayed at the Doubletree Tower of London because it had a roof terrace that enabled me to get the night shots over the Tower. It was also only a few minutes walk from the Tower and also Tower Hill underground station.
One thing we like about specifically English tourist attractions is that they have an on site cafe! The Tower of London has more than one so you can easily spend the day here if you choose, stopping for coffee and lunch in between seeing the various buildings and exhibitions. We have done the guided tour (on a previous visit) and it was excellent but the castle is well signposted so it is easy to take yourself around the parts you want to see.
Be aware that the Crown Jewels exhibition usually has very long queues and as far as I know, you can’t book a time slot. We purchased our tickets online but you can buy them at the Ticket Office opposite the entrance or join the Historic Royal Palaces scheme and get in for free.
My Experience
My notes from this visit to the Tower of London are:
We dumped our stuff and had a coffee before meeting Rich and Debs to head off for our intrepid 5 minute walk to the Tower. We looked at the Trinity House memorial first before doing a circuit of the walls first which was a nice way to re-aquaint ourselves with London landmarks.
We went into the Tower and were told that our guided tour was just about to leave so we headed to the meet point with a few other couples and waited. And waited. Eventually a Beefeater came by and told us that the tour had left and we could catch it up but we decided not to bother and just did our own thing.
We started with an exhibition of prisoners in the tower – this covered most of the famous names and showed lots of graffiti (actually, incredibly ornate carvings rather than our modern idea of graffiti) and details of who was executed when. I didn’t realise that less people were executed in medieval times at the Tower than in the first and second world wars!
We carried on exploring the tower and looking at the views and the ridiculously long queue to see the Crown Jewels before a pause for coffee in the cafe. Once refreshed we headed to the White Tower, the original Norman keep, to see the arms and armour display.
This had changed hugely since our last visit many years ago and we spent well over an hour working our way through each floor. The exhibitions were excellent with a good mix of display and interactive areas and everything was well explained and labelled.
By the time we left it was getting dark so we walked along the banks of the river, enjoying Tower Bridge being illuminated and the huge crowds of people just enjoying the sights before making our way back to the hotel.
Photo Gallery
These next photos were taken in the dim and distant past of 2008 and they were not taken in RAW so these are pretty much unedited jpgs. I’d like to think my own skill in photography has moved on since then too so these may not be ideal pictures. Sorry!
References
For information on the history of the Tower, the Wiki page is here.
For information on visiting the Tower, their page is here.
Full details of this weekend break to London in 2019 are in my blog.