The White Tower's pale stone walls and four turrets against a blue sky with white clouds, seen over the outer castle wall

The White Tower, the oldest part of the Tower of London.

OK, so the Tower of London is a big castle, right on the Thames next to Tower Bridge (the fancy-looking bridge that lifts up and down). It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is worth seeing while you’re in London (or maybe not if you have really small children in tow - see below).

It’s a big complex of different buildings, so there’s quite a lot of things to see. Getting in and out of all of them involves going outside - and maybe even queuing outside - quite a lot, so this isn’t an ideal expedition for a rainy day.

Entry to the Tower of London is £38 for an adult and £19 for a child aged 5 to 15; under-5s are free. Booking online in advance allows you to skip the ticket queue.

There’s not a lot in it for really little children - if you have littlies under the age of about 4, then frankly I wouldn’t bother coming inside the Tower of London - just take a quick look at it from the outside and then go visit somewhere that’s more suitable for little ones. They do get in free of charge but they’ll probably find it quite dull, and that it includes too much walking.

Quite a few of the Tower’s exhibits are also quite gory in nature - I’m guessing that they want to appeal to that portion of tourists who go to the London Dungeon, and it’s true that the Tower does have a genuinely gory history (as opposed to the London Dungeon’s purely ersatz gore). The Yeoman Warders’ tales are full of “imprisonment, execution, torture and much more”, and parts of the tour may frighten young children. The small Torture at the Tower exhibition is dark and shows instruments of torture, so you might skip it with younger ones, unless your idea of fun is “Daddy, what’s torture?”.

Anyhow, if you have children aged about 10 and up (skip the more gory bits perhaps, depending on their temperament) or teenagers, then by all means do get yourselves down to the Tower of London.

If you arrive in London by train, National Rail’s 2FOR1 offer gets a second person in free with each full-price adult ticket, which saves up to £38. Before you go, make a free account on the Days Out Guide website and get the Tower’s ‘pay at the door’ eVoucher. Print it out, because vouchers shown on a phone aren’t accepted, and hand it over at the ticket office with a National Rail ticket into London for each of you. One voucher covers two people. A return ticket counts on any day between its outward and return dates.

Paper tickets and eTickets with the National Rail logo count, including Gatwick Express and Stansted Express tickets and Travelcards bought at a National Rail station. Oyster cards, contactless payment, Travelcards bought at a Tube station, Heathrow Express and Eurostar tickets don’t. If a ticket barrier would keep your paper ticket, ask the staff to let you through. The offer runs all year apart from 19 to 31 December, but it can’t be booked ahead, so on a busy day you may have to wait for the next entry slot with space.

So - what to see when you get there:

A gold crown set with jewels, with a red velvet cap and white ermine band, on a red cushion

A jewelled crown with an ermine band, on a red cushion.

  • Crown Jewels - all the real genuine uber-sparkly King’s and Queen’s crowns, diamonds and assorted bling that you could want. These are pretty popular, so if you arrive at the Tower at opening time then it’s worth getting into this exhibition early, as a crowd will probably build up during the morning. The Tower usually gets quieter in the afternoon again. For the most popular stuff, you have to stand on a moving walkway and progress sideways past it - still, if you haven’t had enough of a look, there is a raised platform at the end of the moving walkway where you can spend more time looking at them. The Crown Jewels are kept under heavily armed guard, so be sure to inform your teenage children in advance that this would be a poor time and place to make jokes about bombs or theft.

A smiling Yeoman Warder in a dark blue and red uniform and hat, with one arm held out, talking to a group of visitors

A Yeoman Warder giving a tour in the Tower’s moat.

Close-up of a raven's head and shoulders, with glossy black feathers and a heavy black beak

One of the Tower’s ravens.

  • Ravens - large, black, flappy. Don’t go too close to them and definitely don’t try to feed them, they will bite you.
  • Yeoman Warders aka ‘Beefeaters’ - large, military, jovial, and often available for photographs.
  • White Tower - this is the ‘keep’ of the castle, and the unmissable best bit of the Tower of London. Arms and armour from the Royal Armouries, including the armours of Henry VIII, Charles I and James II, are exhibited inside but the most interesting part is the nearly-1000-years-old tower building itself. Plenty of interest here for older kids.
  • Tower Walls - the ‘Wall Walk’ along the top of the Tower’s defensive walls, looking out over the moat, the Thames and the City. It’s in three stretches with towers to explore along the way, and it’s included in your ticket. There’s no lift or ramp, so you can’t take a buggy up.

Two ravens standing on a stone wall beside an old black lamp post, with the White Tower behind them

Two of the Tower’s ravens on a wall in front of the White Tower.

🛜 Free, unlimited WiFi at the Tower.