Castle sights in London
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Tower of London
If you pay only one admission fee while you're in London, make it the Tower. One of the city's three World Heritage Sites (joining Westminster Abbey and Maritime Greenwich), it offers a window on to a gruesome and fascinating history.
In the 1070s, William the Conqueror started work on the White Tower to replace the castle he'd previously had built here. By 1285, two walls with towers and a moat were built around it and the defences have barely been altered since. A former royal residence, treasury, mint and arsenal, it became most famous as a prison when Henry VIII moved to Whitehall Palace in 1529 and started dishing out his preferred brand of punishment.
The most strikin…
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Alexandra Park & Palace
Built in 1873 as North London’s answer to Crystal Palace, Alexandra Palace suffered the ignoble fate of burning to the ground only 16 days after opening. Encouraged by attendance figures, investors decided to rebuild and it reopened just two years later. Although it boasted a theatre, museum, lecture hall, library and Great Hall with one of the world’s largest organs, it was no match for Crystal Palace. It housed German prisoners of war during WWI and in 1936 was the scene of the world’s first TV transmission – a variety show called Here’s Looking at You. The palace burned down again in 1980 but was rebuilt for the third time and opened in 1988. Today ‘Ally Pall…
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