Submitted by Madeline Lewis on the 2017 winter session program in London, England sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of Theater…
By far, one of the best experiences I’ve had in London so far has been visiting the Tower of London. The name is kind of misleading, because it’s not just one tower, but really over twenty towers forming an enormous castle that has served as a center of governmental power, a royal palace, a prison, an execution site and a military base in the nearly one thousand years since it was first built.
A thousand years! Let that sink in – I know I had to take a few moments to really appreciate it while I was there. That amount of time is so huge, I can’t describe it as anything other than mind-boggling. The fact that a building that old is still standing, and that I can go inside it and touch its walls and stand on its floors, is simply incredible. It’s one of those moments where you really see the differences in British and American History.
The oldest structures that we have in the United States, and I mean the oldest of the old, are less than half the age of the Tower of London. The Yeoman Warder, a member of the ceremonial military unit that guards the tower, even made a joke about it by saying at the beginning of the tour that Americans have no history! Which, in a way, is kind of true. There are only a handful of buildings in the United States still standing that were built before the 1700’s, when the Tower of London had already been in continuous use for over half a millennium! And it’s still being used today, whereas many of our oldest buildings are so at risk of collapsing that you aren’t allowed to get near them.
One of the coolest things about the Tower was getting to stand up on the wall and look out over the city. Because the Tower isn’t isolated from the rest of London, it’s a part of it. It’s right at the heart of it all, which I guess was the point back when it was built. I could stand on top of a wall built hundreds of years ago and walk along the same path that kings and queens and warriors and heroes and traitors all walked on, and look out at a 21st-century city. A city full of the kind of technology that, if they could somehow be transported into it, would make the people who built the White Tower in 1078 literally keel over and die. That’s how much has changed in the last thousand years, but the Tower still stands. It is both a reminder of where we’ve come from and a statement of perseverance and endurance for the future.