London History, Up Close

On 14 January 1559, Elizabeth I climbed into a litter of cloth of gold carried by two mules and left the Tower of London for Westminster. The Elizabeth I coronation procession through London was not merely ceremonial. It was the new queen’s first and most important act of government. Her sister Mary had imprisoned her in the Tower five years earlier on suspicion of treason. Now she was queen, and the same walls that had held her were the starting point for one of the most elaborate public...

A Quaker who founded a colony as a “holy experiment” in religious tolerance was baptised here in 1644. A future American president married here in 1797, writing home two days later to introduce his new wife to his parents. All Hallows by the Tower, the oldest church in the City of London, has an unlikely thread running through the founding of America – and the story of that thread is stranger, and more complicated, than the blue plaques suggest. The Boy Baptised by the...

The oldest church in the City of London has survived a medieval gunpowder explosion, the Great Fire of London, the Blitz, and several centuries of knife fights in its churchyard. It has sheltered sanctuary seekers and Knights Templar awaiting heresy trials, and gave Samuel Pepys a vantage point from which to survey the ruins of his city. All Hallows by the Tower is still standing. Everything around it, at various points, has not been. Older Than You Think All Hallows by the...

On the night of 29 December 1940, a German bomb fell on the Tower of London. The blast knocked the Chief Yeoman Warder clean off his feet. He got up, dusted himself off, and completed the Ceremony of the Keys. The ceremony had not been interrupted since Edward III invented it in 1340 after walking into his own fortress unchallenged one December night and deciding something ought to be done about it. The Tower’s traditions are like that: specific in origin, peculiar in detail, and...

Ravens at the Tower of London. The raven enclosure sits within the Tower of London’s inner ward, a short walk from the White Tower. Six ravens live here at any given time, tended by a keeper with the title of Ravenmaster. Tourists photograph them. Tour guides invoke them. The legend is everywhere: if the ravens ever leave the Tower, both the fortress and the kingdom will fall. King Charles II was so alarmed by the prophecy that he ordered the birds protected, even at the expense of his...

The Martin Tower at the Tower of London. The Martin Tower is not the Tower of London’s most impressive structure. It is squat and circular, 39 feet high, built from Kentish ragstone in the 1230s. For most of its history it served as a storage room, a prison, and a set of lodgings. For 172 years, it also held the Crown Jewels of England. On the morning of 9 May 1671, it came within nine minutes of losing them. A New Set of Jewels for a New King The Crown Jewels that Thomas...

The outer walls of the Tower of London were built to be impregnable. Edward I spent the equivalent of over £11 million today transforming the fortress into the strongest castle in England. Successive kings reinforced its walls, deepened its moat, and multiplied its towers. The Tower had never fallen. It would not fall to an army. As it turned out, all it took was an open gate and a distracted teenager. On 14 June 1381, the Peasants’ Revolt breached it anyway. Not with siege...

Inside the Beauchamp Tower, scratched low into the stone at knee height, is a single name: JANE. Someone carved it during the winter of 1553-54, probably Guildford Dudley, Jane Grey’s teenage husband, imprisoned here after his wife’s nine-day reign collapsed. It is not an inscription that announces itself. You have to know to look for it. The Tower of London is full of such traces – moments of desperation preserved in stone by people who had run out of other options. Few...

The White Tower is the oldest and most imposing structure in the Tower of London complex. William the Conqueror built it in the late 1070s – a vast stone cube with four corner turrets, designed to loom over London’s low skyline. The message was unambiguous: there was a new king, and dissent would not be tolerated. For the first decades of its existence it was simply called the Great Tower, and it stood alone. The sprawling complex of walls, towers, and gatehouses that surrounds it...

The memorial in Trinity Gardens on Tower Hill sits on the approximate site of the old scaffold. Bronze plaques set into the ground record 27 names – politicians, nobles, rebels, and traitors who died here publicly, in front of crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands. A central plaque notes that more than 125 people lost their lives on this spot “for the sake of their faith, country or ideals.” The 27 names represent only a fraction. Most who died here went...