Nigel Jones

The building of our history

Athens, for all its current woes, still has the Parthenon. Rome has the Colosseum, Paris the Louvre, Berlin the Reichstag, Beijing the forbidden city, Moscow the Kremlin and Washington the White House. But where in London is there a structure that sums up and encapsulates the sweep of  English History from 1066 and all that, to the Second World War and beyond?

The answer is certainly obvious to the 2-3 million mainly overseas visitors who flock to the Tower of London every year, making it easily Britain’s top tourist attraction. What makes the Tower such a magnet is surely the sheer multiplicity of functions it has fulfilled over the centuries, and the fact that almost everyone who is anyone in English history — from William the Conqueror who had it built, to the Kray twins who were among its last detainees — has a link to this grim, grey fortress on the Thames. It is a rich subject, as I found when writing my new book on its past.

The Normans who founded the Tower were masters at throwing up instant castles to house themselves and overawe the inhabitants of their newly conquered lands. Like an IKEA cupboard, their flatpack timber fortresses could be built in a week, and set in stone later when it looked like their occupation had become permanent. Sited on the remains of a Roman fort tucked into the south-east corner of Londinium’s city walls — (Shakespeare, not always an accurate historian, was apparently among those who thought that the White Tower, the Tower’s central keep, was built by Julius Caesar) — the Tower’s first function, after it was built in 1078, was that of a castle to hold London’s Norman garrison.

The later Norman kings erected a Royal palace (now vanished) south of the White Tower, and it became a principal Royal residence where, down to the reign of Elizabeth I, monarchs would traditionally spend their pre-coronation night in vigil and prayer before a triumphal procession, past fountains running red with wine, to Westminster Abbey.

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