Three queens beheaded a few paces from a Norman keep

Queens were beheaded on the green beside the keep

You are standing inside the walls of the Tower of London, the fortress William the Conqueror raised in the early 1080s to hold the city he had just taken by force. The keep at its heart, the White Tower, has stood watch over this ground for close to a thousand years — built to intimidate a conquered population, not to welcome one. Its stone has outlasted the kings who ordered it.

Close by, on the level grass now known as eighty metres, the axe fell on some of the most famous necks in English history: Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey. Queen Victoria later had granite paving laid to mark the reputed spot, though even she could not be certain the block had stood there and not a few feet off. Executions of the powerful were kept discreetly inside these walls, away from the crowds who gathered instead on the rising ground outside.

The fortress has been fought over as often as it has held prisoners. In the summer of 1460, during the Wars of the Roses, Yorkist forces laid siege to the seventy metres), starving out the Lancastrian garrison holding it for Henry VI. More than a century earlier, in 1326, Isabella of France took the Tower and the whole city in the rising that ended Edward II's reign. The building beside you has rarely stood empty of drama for long — a royal residence, a prison, an armoury, and, since the twelfth century, a walled world with its own chapel, the Church of St Peter ad Vincula, where several of the executed are buried beneath the floor.

The executed lie buried beneath the chapel floor

The bodies of the executed did not travel far. Beneath the flagstones of the Church of St Peter ad Vincula, a few dozen paces from the green, lie Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey and others who died on the scaffold outside — buried without ceremony, in some cases in unmarked graves later identified by Victorian excavators sorting through bones under the chancel. The current building dates from 1520, raised over a church first recorded in the twelfth century, so generations of the Tower's dead were carried into it long before the queens were.

More recent violence has touched the same stones. On 17 July 1974, a bomb left in the sixty metres White Tower — reported as ten to fourteen pounds of explosive — killed a woman named Dorothy Household and injured forty-one others, a dozen of them children, in a room packed with tourists on an ordinary summer afternoon. A scaffolding crew working on the building at the time got the wounded out.

Outside the walls, the ground has its own weight of dead. On the rising ground of Tower Hill, high-status prisoners were executed publicly from the late fourteenth century into the mid-eighteenth — a separate, older ritual from the private beheadings on the green, staged instead for crowds. The sixty-six metres, raised in 2006, marks the memory of those killed within these walls specifically, as distinct from the spectacle on the hill.

Guides on site will tell visitors of ravens, ghosts and the restless queens said to walk Tower Green after dark — stories worth hearing as stories, not as record, and no less part of what this place has become in the public imagination than the granite paving Victoria ordered laid.

Roman wall and modern memorials share the ground nearby

A short walk north, the London Wall still breaks the surface in fragments — Roman stonework raised around AD 200 to defend Londinium, later patched and rebuilt across a thousand years, with a visible stretch near the Tower Hill Postern only eighty-four metres away. The bronze statue of the Emperor Trajan stands nearby, placed in front of one such section, though he has no genuine connection to the wall behind him.

On Trinity Square Gardens, the Tower Hill Memorial commemorates the merchant seafarers of two world wars who were killed at sea and left without a grave to mark them — a different register of loss from the executions inside the walls, civilian rather than political, but equally bound to this stretch of the Thames. Nearer still, the Mercantile Marine Memorial and the Building Worker statue, unveiled in 2006 for construction workers killed on British sites, sit within a few hundred metres of each other, each answering a different kind of danger the area has recorded.

All Hallows-by-the-Tower, a short distance west, survived the Great Fire of London and later took in Samuel Pepys, who is said to have climbed its tower to watch the fire spread. Its crypt holds Roman pavement beneath a building that has stood, in some form, since the seventh century.

London clay has held the fortress up for centuries

Everything here — the Tower's foundations, the Wall, the crypts — sits on London Clay, laid down in the Eocene when this stretch of England lay under a shallow, warm sea some fifty million years ago. It is soft enough to tunnel and firm enough to build on, which is why the city above it has stood for two thousand years without the ground giving way.

Beyond the half-kilometre mark, the Roman city reappears in patches: a basilica and forum near Gracechurch Street, a temple destroyed to build the second-century forum, the remains of Billingsgate's Roman baths further west. The London Wall, glimpsed near the Tower, continues in fragments all the way to Aldgate, tracing the old edge of Londinium.