Tower of London & City Walking Tour: History & Landmarks

wer Hill Station, where nearly two thousand years of history rise from the ground beneath your feet. This is where London began. Your guide sets the scene at Tower Hill, where a surviving stretch of the ancient Roman wall still marks the edge of Londinium, the settlement founded by the Romans around AD 50 on the banks of the Thames. From this river port grew the square mile that would become the City of London — a place with its own laws, customs and fierce independence. Standing between the Roman past and the modern towers of finance, your guide introduces the walk ahead: royal fortresses and executions, fire and plague, trade and empire, and the hidden lanes where the City's oldest stories still linger.

We arrive at the Tower of London, the great stone fortress on the Thames begun by William the Conqueror nearly a thousand years ago to dominate his newly conquered city. Your guide unfolds its many lives: royal palace, armoury, treasury and, most notoriously, prison. Within these walls, queens and traitors met their end — Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard among those executed on the orders of Henry VIII — while the ravens, by legend, still guard the kingdom's fate. Here too the Crown Jewels are kept, the dazzling regalia of the British monarchy. Your guide brings the fortress to life with tales of imprisonment, escape and execution, and the Yeoman Warders who have guarded it for centuries. Few buildings hold so much of England's history — and so many of its darkest secrets — behind a single set of walls.

A short walk brings us to the river's edge, with Tower Bridge rising ahead — its twin Gothic towers and blue suspension chains among the most recognisable sights in the world. Your guide explains how this stretch of the Thames was the lifeblood of London: the tidal highway that carried goods, ships and people, and made the City one of the greatest trading ports on earth. Completed in 1894, Tower Bridge was an engineering marvel of its age, its bascules still lifting to let tall vessels pass beneath. It's also simply one of the finest viewpoints in London, where the ancient Tower, the modern skyline and the working river all meet. Your guide pauses here to take in the panorama and trace how the Thames shaped the city's fortunes for two thousand years.

We continue to London Bridge, the oldest river crossing in the city and, for centuries, the only one — a place woven deep into London's history and its nursery rhymes alike. Your guide tells its long and dramatic story: the Roman timber bridge, the famous medieval stone bridge crowded with houses, shops and even a chapel, and the grim custom of displaying the severed heads of traitors on its southern gate. That old bridge stood for more than six hundred years before being replaced, and its successors have carried Londoners across the water ever since. Standing at this ancient crossing point, your guide explains how the bridge shaped the growth of the City on one bank and Southwark on the other — and why "London Bridge is falling down" carries echoes of very real history.

We reach the Monument, the towering fluted column designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to commemorate one of the most catastrophic events in the city's history. Your guide recounts the Great Fire of September 1666, which broke out in a baker's shop on Pudding Lane and raged for four days, devouring much of the medieval City — thousands of houses and dozens of churches, including old St Paul's. The Monument stands exactly 202 feet from where the fire began, its height marking the precise distance to the spot. From the ashes rose a new London. Your guide explains how the disaster reshaped the city forever, clearing the crowded timber streets and giving Wren the chance to rebuild in stone — a transformation whose results still surround us on this walk.

We step into Leadenhall Market, a breathtaking Victorian arcade of wrought iron and glass, its cream and maroon paintwork and cobbled floor glowing beneath an ornate roof. Your guide reveals the astonishing depth of history beneath it: this was the very heart of Roman Londinium, the site of the forum and basilica — the largest such structure north of the Alps — where the city's public life once unfolded. A market has stood here in some form since the fourteenth century, trading in poultry, game and cheese. The elegant structure you see today was built in 1881, and its atmospheric lanes have since found fame on screen as a filming location. Your guide draws the threads together — Roman forum, medieval market and Victorian masterpiece, all layered on one remarkable spot.

We arrive at the Royal Exchange, its grand portico of Corinthian columns presiding over the busy heart of the City's financial district. Your guide tells the story of its founder, the Tudor merchant Sir Thomas Gresham, who established the Exchange in 1565 as a place for London's merchants to meet and trade — the first purpose-built centre of commerce in the city. Twice destroyed by fire and rebuilt, the present building dates from 1844 and still marks the symbolic centre of the Square Mile. Here your guide explains how London grew into one of the world's great financial capitals, and how the fortunes made in trade, insurance and banking transformed a medieval city into a global powerhouse whose influence reached across the entire British Empire.

A few steps on stands the Bank of England, the imposing windowless fortress of a building known for centuries as "the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street." Your guide explains its extraordinary role: founded in 1694 to fund government borrowing, the Bank grew into the central bank of the United Kingdom, guardian of the nation's gold reserves and a powerful hand on the global economy. Its high, blank curtain wall — designed to be impregnable — has protected the country's wealth through wars, panics and financial storms. Your guide brings this world of money and power to life, describing how decisions made behind these walls have rippled far beyond the City to shape economies around the world — and why this quiet junction is one of the most important financial sites on the planet.

We come to Mansion House and, close by, the Guildhall — the twin seats of the City of London's remarkable and ancient self-government. Your guide explains the unique constitution of the Square Mile: Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, an office dating back to the twelfth century, while the medieval Guildhall has been the City's town hall for more than six hundred years. Here the livery companies — the descendants of the old trade guilds — still gather, and the City governs itself in ways found nowhere else in Britain. Your guide reveals the pageantry and mystery of this hidden world of aldermen, sheriffs and ceremonies, and how the City of London has fiercely guarded its independence from crown and parliament since the Middle Ages.

Our walk ends before St Paul's Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece crowning Ludgate Hill, its vast dome one of the defining images of London for over three hundred years. Your guide tells its story: how the medieval cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire, and how Wren rebuilt it in soaring English Baroque, completing it in 1710. St Paul's has been the stage for the nation's greatest moments — the funerals of Nelson, Wellington and Churchill, the wedding of Charles and Diana, and services of thanksgiving and mourning alike. Most movingly, your guide recalls the Blitz, when the cathedral survived the bombs that fell all around it, its dome standing defiant through the smoke as a symbol of the city's endurance — a fitting place to end a journey through the story of London.