🇬🇧 United Kingdom · London and Southeast England
Few day trips from London are as complete as Windsor. A little over half an hour from the capital, this charming Berkshire town is dominated by an imposing outline: that of Windsor Castle, the oldest and largest inhabited castle in the world, home to the kings and queens of England since the time of William the Conqueror, more than nine centuries ago. Seeing it set above the River Thames, with its towers and walls, is one of those views that sum up British history at a single glance.
But Windsor is much more than its castle. It is a town of cobbled streets and Georgian houses, of very old pubs and characterful shops, crossed by the majestic Long Walk, a tree-lined avenue almost five kilometres long linking the castle with Windsor Great Park. Across the river, a footbridge leads to Eton, home of the famous Eton College, where prime ministers and princes studied. And for families, Legoland Windsor turns the visit into an adventure for the little ones.
This guide covers Windsor with a practical, warm eye: how to get here from London and Heathrow, what to see inside and outside the castle, when the changing of the guard takes place, how to enjoy the Great Park and the Thames, and where to eat and sleep. Whether as a half-day escape or a relaxed stop on a longer trip around England, Windsor gives you a concentrated dose of royal history, elegance and English countryside.
Windsor's history is inseparable from its castle. Around 1070, shortly after the Norman conquest of England, William the Conqueror chose a hill above the Thames on which to build one of the fortresses ringing and protecting London: so Windsor Castle was born, at first a timber structure with the classic Norman motte-and-bailey layout. Over the centuries, successive monarchs rebuilt it in stone and enlarged it: Henry II raised the Round Tower, Edward III turned it into a Gothic palace and founded the Order of the Garter there (the country's oldest order of chivalry), and Edward IV began the splendid St George's Chapel. The town of 'New Windsor' grew up at the foot of the fortress, while the original village ('Old Windsor') stayed a little further south. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made Windsor their favourite home, and the place became bound to the monarchy for good: the British royal house itself adopted the name 'Windsor' in 1917, during the First World War, to sound more English and less German. The castle has been the setting for royal weddings, state funerals and the everyday life of the royal family, and it is still an official residence in full use. The full story is on our history page.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Windsor's history begins with the Norman conquest of England. After winning the Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror needed to secure control of his new kingdom and, in particular, to protect London. To that end he ordered a ring of fortresses built around the capital, a day's journey apart. Around 1070 he chose a chalk hill above the River Thames, at a strategic point commanding the river and the route west, to build what would become Windsor Castle.
The first structure followed the classic Norman motte-and-bailey model: an artificial earth mound (the motte) topped by a timber tower, surrounded by walled courtyards (the baileys). Its purpose was purely military and defensive. The castle was meant to watch over the river approach to London and to serve as a refuge and base of operations for the new Norman nobility in a land only recently conquered and not entirely pacified.
The site proved so well chosen that the castle has never fallen out of use. The name 'Windsor' derives from the old Saxon settlement of Windlesora (interpreted as 'winch bank' or 'bank with a landing place'), a little further south, where Old Windsor now stands. When the castle and a town grew up beside the fortress, that new settlement came to be called New Windsor, while the original village kept the name Old Windsor. So on top of that primitive eleventh-century timber fortress stands the oldest inhabited castle in the world.
Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English kings gradually turned the timber fortress into a stone castle. Henry II, at the end of the twelfth century, rebuilt the walls in stone and raised the Round Tower on the central motte, which is still the heart and the most recognisable image of the castle. The precinct was organised into three great courtyards or wards (upper, middle and lower) that still structure a visit today. The castle withstood sieges, such as the one by the rebel barons during King John's reign, at the time of Magna Carta (1215).
The great leap from fortress to palatial residence came with Edward III in the fourteenth century. Born in the castle himself, this monarch undertook one of the most expensive building projects in medieval England, turning Windsor into a sumptuous Gothic palace fit for the court. But his most enduring contribution was of another kind: in 1348 he founded the Order of the Garter there, the oldest and most prestigious order of chivalry in the United Kingdom, inspired by the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
The Order of the Garter, with its famous French motto 'Honi soit qui mal y pense' ('Shame on him who thinks evil of it'), bound the castle for ever to chivalry and to the splendour of the crown. Windsor thus became the setting for tournaments, ceremonies and royal celebrations. Later, Edward IV would begin building the magnificent St George's Chapel, the order's spiritual home, which his successors would complete in full Perpendicular Gothic: one of the high points of English architecture.
The seventeenth century brought Windsor dramatic episodes of British history. During the English Civil War (1642-1651), which set the king's supporters against Parliament's, the castle was taken by parliamentary forces and used as a headquarters and also as a prison. King Charles I himself was confined at Windsor before his trial, and after his execution in 1649 his body was brought there in secret and buried in St George's Chapel, without the pomp due to a monarch.
With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, King Charles II wanted to give Windsor back its splendour and to rival the great European palaces, especially Louis XIV's Versailles. He commissioned an ambitious remodelling of the State Apartments in Baroque style, with ceilings painted by artists such as Antonio Verrio and carvings by the celebrated Grinling Gibbons. He also laid out the majestic Long Walk, the tree-lined avenue almost five kilometres long running from the castle towards the Great Park, conceived as a grand ceremonial vista.
In the following centuries the castle went on evolving. George III and, above all, George IV in the early nineteenth century commissioned the architect Jeffry Wyatville to carry out a far-reaching transformation that gave the castle much of its present romantic, 'medievalising' look: the Round Tower was raised to make it more imposing, the facades were unified and that fairy-tale castle image that now dominates the town was reinforced. Windsor thus went from medieval fortress and Baroque palace to a monumental symbol of the British monarchy.
If one reign bound the monarchy emotionally to Windsor, it was that of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). Together with her husband, Prince Albert, Victoria made the castle one of her favourite homes, where she spent long periods and received the great figures of the age. Windsor was the setting for the royal couple's family life and for the education of their many children, at a time when the British monarchy was strengthening its image as a model of family life.
The death of Prince Albert, in 1861, deeply marked that bond. Devastated by the loss, Victoria entered a strict and prolonged mourning that kept her away from public life for years, much of it spent in seclusion at Windsor, which earned her the nickname 'the Widow of Windsor'. As a tribute to her husband, monuments such as the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore were built in the castle grounds, where the two are buried together.
During the Victorian era, moreover, the arrival of the railway brought Windsor closer to London and the rest of the country: in 1849 the lines connecting the town with the capital opened, which made travel easier both for the court and, in time, for visitors. Windsor was thus established, already in the nineteenth century, as an emblematic royal residence and as a destination, a double status it keeps to this day.
One of the most curious and revealing episodes in Windsor's history took place in the middle of the First World War. The British royal family belonged, on the paternal side, to the dynasty of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, of clearly German origin. In the middle of the war against Germany, that Germanic name was politically untenable and stirred anti-monarchist feeling. So, in 1917, King George V decided to change the name of the royal house and adopt an unmistakably English one: he took that of the crown's most emblematic castle and proclaimed the birth of the House of Windsor.
Since then, 'Windsor' names not only the town and the castle but the reigning dynasty of the United Kingdom itself. It is one of the few cases in which a town gave its name to a whole royal house. The castle went on being, through the twentieth century, both residence and refuge: during the Second World War, the then princesses Elizabeth and Margaret spent much of the conflict at Windsor, safe from the bombing of London.
The twentieth century also brought a dramatic episode: on 20 November 1992, a major fire devastated part of the castle, seriously damaging several historic rooms. The restoration, which took five years and was completed in 1997, was an enormous undertaking that returned the affected apartments to their splendour. In the twenty-first century, Windsor has been the setting for high-profile royal weddings, such as that of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in St George's Chapel in 2018, and it became the resting place of Queen Elizabeth II, who died in 2022 and lies with her family in the same chapel. Almost a thousand years after William the Conqueror, Windsor is still the living heart of the British monarchy.