The Un-White Un-Tower

Sorry about the wait between posts, as it happened finals week fell right between our trip to Windsor and our second group trip (and my eighth) to London's Westminster area. I found that very disorienting and now that I'm home, it won't happen again.

We started the day again with the typical 2-hour bus trip up to Westminster, and a fairly large portion of the group was beginning to get sick of London by this point. But we couldn't rightly go to England and not see the Tower of London, that's crazy-talk. And admittedly, once people saw some of the stuff that's inside the Tower, we changed our minds.

When someone thinks about a tower now, they generally think about something like a vertically-elongated rectangle; something significantly taller than it is wide. The Normans would like to take this opportunity to defy you.

The only thing that makes the White Tower an actual tower are the spires at the four corners, which are, if we are honest with ourselves, very typical of Norman keep construction (see the post on Dover if you think I'm lying). Further, the only thing that makes the tower white as such is the corner masonry.

But try to keep this in perspective, as I'm not doing at all: when it was built, this was the tallest structure in England. It remained so for some time, too.

Not that the London Skyline will help you remember that. That giant easter egg that looks like an Arcology from Sim City is the Swiss Re Tower, or so my impeccable sources at Google Earth say.

But even with all those marks against it, the tower is interesting for its historic value. Not that it has a particularly benevolent history, especially given its use during Henry VIII's reign and the oppression and murder of the Catholics, by which I mean Queen Victoria I's reign. We all have our political heroes, but the Tower makes it clear that your political hero probably shouldn't be a Tudor.

Exhibit A: Traitor's Gate. If you were a political prisoner during the Tudor dynasty you would be brought through this gate to your inevitable imprisonment, probable torture, and maybe your execution if it's a slow Saturday.

Fortunately, it's not all bad. A good example of perhaps a brighter period in the Tower's history is the torture chamber...

Ok, well maybe there's something else...

Ok, that's bad but it wasn't all like that...

This is clearly not going to improve. Moving right along to something less horrific than the Tudors.

Most of the cells for political prisoners are in the perimeter wall and not the keep itself. The keep is now home to an impressive collection of field armor as well as an array of weaponry from various eras in English history. And luckily for all of us, we were allowed to take pictures here.

Something that I hadn't really realized was that children would sometimes be present in combat; obviously a child soldier is nothing new to the world but apparently, some rich lords would bring their children into battle with them often enough that they would have a suit of armor made for their child.

Sort of like a construction worker getting his son a miniature hardhat, I suppose. But this wasn't an isolated incident, either. Some of the more impressive suits of armor were actually made for children, including these two.

At a guess, these two suits look to be built for 13- or 14-year-olds, and the previous suit perhaps for someone perhaps 9 to 11 years old. Certainly no older than that. Not that these particular children would actually participate in the melee, but they would be there on the field with their dads, learning the trade they would inevitably be involved in later in life.

Then there's our dear old friend, Henry VIII again.


His paranoia about having a male heir might be obvious here. This suit of armor is impressive because it is one of perhaps 8 in the world to be fully articulated with no gaps. Moving on to someone with good taste, there's this suit made for the Earl of Worchester.

The Captain enjoyed looking at this as much as I did. The gilding is present but not too flamboyant, The helmet is classy as can be, and there are no distracting protrusions. This is a man who was very ready to defend his Earldom's reputation for good taste, and would continue that legacy even today with a particular type of sauce that you may know by his name (fact check needed).

Beyond the armor, there was also the armory, which looked like something out of The Matrix (the first, cool one; not the later two philosophical suckfests). Guns - lots of guns.

So many guns, that they decided to use them as decorations for lack of enough people to actually shoot with them.


Obviously if you were a noble, you could afford an extremely expensive, very elaborate firearm. The only person who would have had the wherewithal to own this weapon, though, would be Duke Nukem.

When you've locked up the people you're most likely to shoot in the tower already, and you've got your torture devices working on them as it is, you realize just how pretty guns really are and you want to put them on everything. Guns are like ketchup for Royal interior decorators.

Not sure how to fill that patch of lawn that isn't growing properly? Put guns on it.

Some of these cannons were captured, and others just tossed there for decorative purposes. Yet just like Windsor, the Crown is making no effort at all to return these priceless bits of history to their home nations. They captured them fair and square, no use whining about it now.


Much of the scenery at the Tower couldn't hold a candle to Windsor, but that's to be expected. Even so, some of the courtyard was still worth taking a long look at. This is another one of those sites where the Romans built first, then the next guys knocked it down and built something else on top of it. The Roman wall is still standing in a number of places.

And just as a side note, there's an old superstition that says if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, England will fall. Not leaving anything to chance, the ravens are now caged there. Let's see you deal with that, you stupid ominous portent!

The Tower Bridge is in the background here, and its actually quite a bit cooler than the crappy tourist t-shirts suggest. The paint is bright, the towers are clean, and it really is quite impressive to walk on. There are very expensive tours of the towers that will let you cross on the upper walkways, but I gave it a miss because I was short on both time and money by the time I got over to it.

Obviously the tower bridge isn't from the same era as the Tower of London is and didn't serve the same purpose. But it's one more of those incredibly impressive things that just don't exist in the United States, and probably never could.

The cost to maintain a heritage site like this is astronomical, and tourism doesn't always pay for the whole mess. But from the bridge, one can see the entire tower complex, the more interesting bits of the London skyline, and the HMS Belfast - a warship that was moored in the Thames river to become a Naval Museum.


On the same day, we would also see the rebuilt Globe Theater and the newly opened Tate Modern Art gallery, both a stone's throw from the Millenium Bridge. All that will be in the next post though, as clearly we covered enough ground in one day for several posts and to lump them all together would be punishing.