Most Tower of London fact lists have been copying each other since about 2015. This one has been checked against Historic Royal Palaces’ own pages, and several of the things everyone repeats turn out to be wrong.
Here is the one that surprised us most: the number of people executed on Tower Green is ten, not seven. Historic Royal Palaces puts it plainly – seven by beheading, three by firing squad. Almost every article online says seven, because almost every article online is counting Tudors and forgetting the twentieth century.
That’s the spirit of what follows: 21 genuinely interesting things about the Tower, with the received wisdom corrected where it needs correcting, plus the practical details that actually change how you visit – including a £1 ticket, a £10 ceremony, and the fact that there is no family ticket at all.
The essentials, checked for 2026
- Adult ticket: £37, or £40.70 if you add the voluntary donation.
- Child (5–15) and young person (16–17): £18.50. Under-fives free and don’t need a ticket.
- Senior, student and disabled concession: £29.50. Carers go free.
- There is no family ticket. Historic Royal Palaces doesn’t offer one, whatever other sites tell you.
- There is a £1 ticket for anyone on Universal Credit, Tax Credits, Pension Credit or employment-related benefits. It is barely publicised and it is the single most useful fact on this page.
- Membership starts at around £65 a year and gets you in free – which pays for itself in two visits, across all the HRP palaces.
- Opening: roughly 9am–5.30pm Tuesday to Saturday, 10am on Sundays, last entry 4.30pm and the last Yeoman Warder tour at 3.15pm. HRP now runs a date-by-date calendar rather than fixed seasons, so check the day you’re going.
Facts about the ravens
1. There are eight ravens – and the Tower’s own website can’t agree on that
The current birds are Harris, Jubilee, Poppy, Edgar, Georgie, Chaos, Henry and Poe. That’s straight from the Tower’s ravens page. Amusingly, a different page on the same website says there are six. Eight is the list they actually publish by name, so eight it is.
2. The legend that they can never leave is Stuart, not medieval
Charles II is the monarch usually credited with insisting the ravens stay: lose them, and the Kingdom and the Tower fall with them. It feels like something from 1078. It isn’t – and there is no documentary trace of the superstition before the nineteenth century, which makes it one of the great successful pieces of British myth-making.
3. They have their own keeper, and their own early-morning experience
The Ravenmaster is a Yeoman Warder whose entire job is the birds. You can meet the team on the Ravens Experience, which runs at 8.15am on Wednesdays and Fridays before the Tower opens – £90 for adults, £50 for children, and worth it if the ravens are why you’re coming at all.
Facts about the Crown Jewels
4. There are 23,578 gemstones
That is Historic Royal Palaces’ own count of the working collection of regalia. Not a valuation, not an estimate by a jeweller – a count.
5. They have never been valued, and they are not insured
Figures of £2–4 billion get thrown around. None of them come from anyone official, because the collection is considered unsaleable and therefore unpriceable. It is also, unusually for objects of that significance, uninsured.
6. What you see today was redesigned for the 2023 Coronation
The Jewel House reopened after the May 2023 Coronation with a new display, including the state crown frames of George I, George IV and Queen Victoria shown publicly for the first time. Three further items from the Royal Ceremonial Dress Collection joined the display in January 2026, so it’s worth another look even if you went two years ago.
7. They’ve been kept here since the 1600s – and they leave for coronations
The regalia has been at the Tower since the seventeenth century. When a monarch is crowned, the pieces are escorted to Westminster Abbey and back. An estimated 30 million people have seen them, which makes them among the most-looked-at objects in Britain.
Facts about prisoners and executions
8. Ten people have been executed on Tower Green – not seven
Seven by beheading, three by firing squad, per Historic Royal Palaces. The beheadings include Anne Boleyn in 1536, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury. Private execution on the Green was a privilege of rank; everyone else died in front of a crowd on Tower Hill.
9. The Tower was never designed as a prison
It was built as a fortress and a statement of Norman power – a royal palace that happened to be extremely difficult to get into. The prison function was improvised, and it stuck: by the Tudor period the Tower was the most feared address in England.
10. The Krays were held here – for punching a corporal
Ronnie and Reggie Kray were among the last people imprisoned at the Tower, in 1952. Not for anything gangland: they’d been called up to the Royal Fusiliers, whose headquarters are still at the Tower, and hit an NCO on their first day.
11. A priest escaped using orange juice as invisible ink
John Gerard, a Jesuit arrested in 1594 for being a Catholic priest in Protestant England, was tortured in the Tower and wrote secret letters in orange juice, which shows up when warmed. In 1597 he abseiled down the wall on a rope strung across the moat and got clean away. His hands had been ruined by the manacles; he had to be hauled most of the way.
Facts about the Yeoman Warders
12. You need 22 years in the armed forces to become one
The bar is high and specific: at least 22 years’ military service, a certain rank, and the Long Service and Good Conduct Medal. It is not a tour-guide job that soldiers drift into – it’s a second career you qualify for.
13. They live inside the Tower, with their families
Yeoman Warders and their households live within the walls. Which means that after the last visitor has gone and the gates are locked, the Tower of London is a small residential village with a pub in it.
14. The pub is called The Keys, and you can’t go in
There is a private bar inside the walls for the Warders and their families, hung with Beefeater insignia and royal symbols, and each Warder takes a turn behind the bar. It is not open to the public, which is presumably the entire point. For ones you can actually drink in, see our guide to the oldest pubs in London.
Facts about the building, the moat and the menagerie
15. The White Tower has been standing since the 1070s
William the Conqueror began it around 1078, in Caen stone shipped from Normandy. It is the oldest part of the complex and the reason for the name – everything else grew around it in concentric rings over the following three centuries.
16. Its full name is His Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London
A fact that changed recently and quietly: it was Her Majesty’s until September 2022. Palace first, fortress second – which tells you what it was actually for.
17. This was London’s first zoo, for 600 years
The Royal Menagerie ran from the 1200s until 1835. It started in 1235 when Henry III was given three big cats – recorded as leopards, almost certainly lions – followed by a polar bear in 1252 that was allowed to fish in the Thames on a long chain, and an African elephant in 1255. Wire sculptures around the grounds mark where the animals were kept.
18. The moat is being turned into a living landscape
The moat was drained in 1843 on health grounds and spent most of the next 180 years as grass. Superbloom filled it with 20 million flowers for the Platinum Jubilee in 2022, and in July 2026 Historic Royal Palaces announced that it will become “a biodiverse and climate-resilient landscape” as part of its largest-ever investment in learning and community work – including an open-air “green classroom” built into the moat itself. No completion date has been published yet.
19. The Royal Mint struck England’s coins here for 500 years
Coins were made at the Tower from the 1270s until the Mint moved out to Tower Hill in the early 1800s – which is why the street inside the walls is still called Mint Street. Isaac Newton ran the place as Warden and then Master, and personally pursued counterfeiters through the taverns of London.
Facts about the Tower at war
20. Twelve spies were executed here in the World Wars
The moat was a training ground for the Royal Fusiliers in the First World War, and eleven German spies were shot at the Tower between 1914 and 1916. A twelfth, Josef Jakobs, was executed by firing squad in August 1941 – the last person ever to be executed at the Tower. Rudolf Hess was held here briefly in 1941 after parachuting into Scotland.
21. It was hit hard in the Blitz
The Tower came through the First World War almost untouched and was badly bombed in the Second. In 1940 the North Bastion took a direct hit and collapsed into the moat. The damage was made good and the Tower reopened – and the Constable’s Tower still carries visible scarring. If you like this sort of thing, our Great Fire of London facts cover the other time the City nearly went.
Two more things worth knowing before you go
Skeletons keep turning up. In 2019 archaeologists found two burials dating to around 1500 beneath the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula – an adult woman and a child, with a dog nearby. The Tower has been continuously occupied for nearly a thousand years, and it gives up something new most times anyone digs.
The Ceremony of the Keys has run every night for over 700 years. Through the Plague, the Great Fire and the Blitz, the Chief Yeoman Warder has locked the gates with the Queen’s – now the King’s – Keys and a lantern. It is now pay-what-you-can, from £10 to £50 with £30 suggested, advance online only. Tickets are released at 1pm on the first working day of the month for the following month; if that day is a Friday, release moves to the Monday. Our full guide to the Ceremony of the Keys covers what actually happens.
How to visit the Tower of London
- Go at opening or after 3pm. The Crown Jewels queue is the whole game – it’s shortest in the first hour and the last two.
- Do the Yeoman Warder tour. It’s included, it leaves every half hour, and the last one is at 3.15pm. It is the best free guiding in London.
- Allow three hours minimum, four if you want the White Tower properly.
- Nearest tube: Tower Hill (District and Circle), two minutes. Tower Gateway on the DLR is about the same.
- Check the calendar, not a season. HRP varies its hours day by day now.
- New since 2025: an official 40-minute river tour from the Tower, running hourly from 10.45am on a separate ticket.
The London x London Take: The Ceremony of the Keys is the best thing you can do at the Tower and it is now pay-what-you-can from £10. Tickets go at 1pm on the first working day of each month for the month after, and they go fast – put a reminder in your phone. It is a far better evening than the daytime visit is a day out.
