Our first impression of London was that it was looked cleaner, felt safer, and smelled better than the cities in Southern California. We walked from the hotel back to the Tower of London after sleeping in for our first full day (and only) in the city. We didn’t have any tickets purchased or really any formal plan, not knowing how jet lagged we might feel.
The lines for tickets at the tower office seemed quite long. We stood in the glare of the sun for a while and wished we had pre-purchased and printed our tickets before hand. However, once inside and passed all the crowds, we were able to get through most of the exhibits pretty quickly.
There was an interesting exhibit debunking some of the myths of torture and the tools that were used. The oldest part of the castle, the White Tower, for which the castle is named, houses an extensive exhibit on the royal armory and the weapon oddities that has been collected over the centuries. Amazingly, this museum has been active for over two hundred years!
The longest line in the tower was to see the crown jewels, and there’s no photography allowed in the exhibit. Despite the line being quite long, the queue goes quite quickly, given there’s a moving walk way in front of the bulk of the items on display to keep people from lingering too long.
One of my favorite parts of touring the Tower was checking out the two Chapels, St. John’s Chapel in the white tower itself which dates back to 1080 AD, and the other Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, rebuilt in 1520 AD from an existing Norman chapel on the same site.
The first chapel has a beautiful tunnel nave and arcade, stark white though informational plaques indicated that it may have once been brightly painted during Norman times.
The Chapel of St. Peter was architecturally more simply, but interesting because it was the first time I’d seen graves located on the inside of the church. Apparently, several tower prisoners, including Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, unfortunate wives of Henry VIII, were buried in the Chapel, among many other notable execute prisoners.
We left the tower near the Traitor’s Gate, located off the water of the Thames River, and caught a couple good selfies with the Tower Bridge.
