Windsor Castle

Windsor Castle has been a royal residence for more than nine centuries, which makes it the longest-occupied palace in Europe and the largest castle in the world that is still lived in. Its plan is the one William the Conqueror laid down in the decade after 1066: a motte-and-bailey castle with its wards gathered around a central mound, on a ridge above the Thames. Everything since has been built onto that Norman skeleton, so the castle reads as a layered document of English monarchy, spread across some thirteen acres.

The silhouette most people know is surprisingly young. Under George IV, from 1824, the architect Jeffry Wyatville reworked the Upper Ward into a romantic Gothic fantasy and raised the Round Tower by about thirty feet so that it would dominate the skyline, at a cost that ran past a million pounds by 1840. Inside, the State Apartments combine seventeenth-century rooms by Hugh May at the western end with Wyatville's grand Georgian sequence to the east. In November 1992 a fire burned for fifteen hours, gutting nine principal rooms and damaging over a hundred more; the restoration, finished in 1997, recreated the lost interiors while using modern craft where the originals could not be saved, and the join is part of the building's story now.

The finest single work at Windsor is St George's Chapel in the Lower Ward, begun by Edward IV in 1475 and one of the high points of the Perpendicular Gothic style. Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and Charles I are buried here, and the Order of the Garter still gathers in the chapel each year. Elsewhere, look for Queen Mary's Dolls' House, designed by Edwin Lutyens and furnished in miniature by the leading makers of the day, and walk out along the Long Walk, a tree-lined avenue running roughly two and a half miles south into Windsor Great Park, from where the castle rises on its ridge exactly as it was meant to be seen.

Getting there

The castle stands in the middle of Windsor, a market town about 25 miles (40 km) west of central London; the main public entrance on Castle Hill is a few minutes' walk from the town centre. London Heathrow Airport (LHR) is about 10 km away. By rail, Windsor & Eton Central, almost opposite Castle Hill, is served by a short shuttle from Slough, which has frequent trains from London Paddington; Windsor & Eton Riverside, about 400 m away, has direct trains from London Waterloo that take just under an hour.