Tower of London

The Tower of London is a castle on the north bank of the Thames at the eastern edge of the old City of London. It was founded by William the Conqueror in the months after his victory of 1066, and its great stone keep, the White Tower, became the strongest point of Norman power over England's largest town. Over nine centuries it has served as royal palace, fortress, prison, armoury, mint, treasury and home of the Crown Jewels.

After the Battle of Hastings William circled London, cutting off its supplies until its leaders surrendered in December 1066. A first timber-and-earth castle was built into the south-eastern corner of the old Roman city wall, with the river guarding its southern side. William of Poitiers, the king's biographer, explained that the works were meant to hold down "the huge and brutal populace". Work on the White Tower, overseen by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, is usually dated to 1078, though the exact year is uncertain, and it was probably complete by 1100. It is regarded as the earliest stone keep in England. Its first recorded prisoner, Bishop Ranulf Flambard, was also its first escaper: in 1101 he got his guards drunk and climbed down a rope smuggled in a wine cask.

The castle was enlarged from 1189 under William Longchamp, who governed England while Richard I was on crusade, and it faced its first siege in 1191. During the troubles of King John's reign it was besieged again in 1214, and rebel barons kept control of it for a time after Magna Carta. Henry III and Edward I gave the Tower essentially its present form in the thirteenth century, adding a ring of towered walls, a moat and new gatehouses, and pushing the castle beyond the line of the Roman wall. Londoners resented it as a symbol of royal oppression. Edward I's works cost about £21,000 between 1275 and 1285, and in 1279 the realm's mints were centralised at the Tower. Under the same king some six hundred Jews were imprisoned there in 1278 on charges of coin clipping, ahead of their expulsion from England in 1290.

In the later Middle Ages the Tower held noble captives and prisoners of war, and from at least the fourteenth century monarchs rode in procession from it to Westminster to be crowned, a custom ended in 1661. During the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 rebels broke in and killed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, on Tower Hill. In the Wars of the Roses it was besieged and bombarded in 1460, and Henry VI probably died within its walls. The young Edward V and his brother, the Princes in the Tower, vanished there in 1483; tradition holds that they were murdered, and bones found in 1674 have been linked to them, though this is uncertain.

Under the Tudors the Tower ceased to be a regular royal home. Its grim reputation dates mainly from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and Guy Fawkes were among those held there, and the future Elizabeth I was briefly imprisoned. Even so, torture had to be authorised by the Privy Council, with 48 recorded cases between 1540 and 1640, and only seven executions took place inside the castle before the twentieth century; most were carried out on Tower Hill outside. Parliament gained control of the fortress shortly before the English Civil War broke out in 1642.

The moat was drained from 1843, and in the later nineteenth century the Mint and other institutions moved out. Anthony Salvin and then John Taylor restored the castle towards what they imagined to be its medieval look, removing later features in the process. In the world wars it was again a prison: eleven spies were shot there in the First World War, and Rudolf Hess was held briefly in 1941. Bombs struck it during the Blitz in September 1940, and the damage was repaired after the war.

UNESCO added the Tower to the World Heritage List in 1988. Since 1990 it has been run by the independent charity Historic Royal Palaces, and the Yeomen Warders still guard it. Tall buildings rising nearby have prompted concern that it could be placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger.