Middle Tower and the entrance 4 min read
A polar bear in the Thames
For six hundred years the entrance to the Tower was guarded by lions, and in the 1250s a white bear from Norway was let out on a rope to fish in the river.
Stories
Hiding in plain sight
Every story here is attached to a place you can stand in. Each one separates what the record shows from what is disputed and what is legend, lists its sources, and can be added to your visit.
- Tower Green and the scaffold site 5 min read
Anne Boleyn's last seventeen days
She arrived by river to the same rooms where she had prepared for her coronation three years earlier. This time the barge was not a procession.
- Beauchamp Tower 5 min read
Carved in stone: the Beauchamp Tower graffiti
Tudor prisoners with time on their hands cut their names, their prayers and in one case an entire horoscope into the walls. You can still read them.
- Byward Tower and Water Lane 4 min read
The Ceremony of the Keys: seven minutes to ten
Every night the Tower is locked with the same words, the same lantern and the same challenge. It has been missed once, for the Blitz, and even then it was only late.
- Tower Green and the scaffold site 5 min read
The countess who walked her husband out of the Tower
The night before his execution in 1716, the Earl of Nithsdale left the Tower in a woman's cloak. His wife had planned every step, and then wrote it all down.
- Martin Tower 4 min read
The morning Colonel Blood stole the crown
In 1671 a man dressed as a parson flattened the crown of England with a mallet and walked out with it under his cloak. Then the king gave him a pension.
- The ravens 4 min read
The ravens: a legend younger than it looks
If the ravens leave, the Tower and the kingdom will fall. It is a good story, told with a straight face, and it is probably Victorian.
- Wall walk (Battlements) 5 min read
The Tower's last prisoners
The first prisoner escaped down a rope in 1101. The last man executed here was shot in a chair in 1941. In between the Tower went from royal castle to something close to a museum, and then, briefly, back.
- White Tower 5 min read
The White Tower and the Line of Kings
The keep that gives the whole fortress its name has been standing for 950 years, and it has held the world's oldest museum display for more than three hundred of them.
- Traitors' Gate 4 min read
Traitors' Gate: the name came later
Edward I built it so that a king could arrive by river. The stories of prisoners passing under its arch grew up afterwards, and one of the most famous did not happen.
- Bloody Tower 5 min read
What happened to the Princes in the Tower?
Two boys walked into the Tower in the spring of 1483 and were never seen leaving it. What the record shows, what a box of bones proves, and what nobody can say.
