Tower of London

The Tower of London has announced a very special event that’s happening at the historic castle next year. In ‘Superbloom’, the moat that surrounds the historic building will be filled with tens of thousands of wild blooms to create a spectacular, summer-long display. Visitors will be able to wander through the installation, a rare opportunity for Londoners and visitors to experience a country meadow in the very heart of the capital. ‘Superbloom’ is being created to commemorate the Queen’s 2022 Platinum Jubilee, which will see her having been on the throne for a remarkable 70 years. It will begin with the sowing of 20 million seeds next spring, from carefully chosen varieties of wild flowers. Them from June until September, ‘Superbloom’ will emerge, change in character and balance and finally disappear. It will be like a very slow firework display with no jump scares. The piece will be enhanced with sculptures and sound installations, and is also designed to attract bees, butterflies (and presumably things that eat bees and butterflies). ‘Superbloom’ also harks back to the 2014 installation at the Tower, ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, which saw 800,000 ceramic poppies ‘planted’ in the moat to memorialise the centenary of the outbreak of WWI. It was a stunning and moving piece that attracted tens of thousands of visitors. Hopefully, this new installation will have all of the power of those poppies with none of the tragic associations (though maybe avoid if you’re a hayfe

This lavish new immersive theatre attraction from the Tower of London is, in essence, a 100-minute theme-park ride. Using live acting and pre-recorded VR, it takes you inside the infamous Gunpowder Plot, wherein a group of Catholic radicals – inflamed by King James I’s persecution of their religion – decided to blow the heck out of the Houses of Parliament. London has experienced a proliferation of this sort of big-budget, overtly commercial immersive theatre in recent times: next month we’re getting a big new ‘Peaky Blinders’ show, and ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ is the sister production to the similarly VR-augmented ‘War of the Worlds’ that’s been doing the business in central London for a few years now. What marks the ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ out as special is its superior creative team, headed by writer Danny Robins (‘The Battersea Poltergeist’, ‘2:22 - A Ghost Story’) and director Hannah Price (of the King’s Head and activist company Theatre Uncut. Its greatest strength as a drama is the careful moral ambiguity Robins’s script applies to the England of 1605, riven by conflict between the oppressive Protestant ruling class and the persecuted Catholic minority. We sympathise with the oppressed. But is detonating the Palace of Westminster and its bustling surroundings the answer? Although actually staged in the vaults just outside the Tower of London, the story begins in a recreation of the Tower, where the groups of up to 16 ticketholders are cast as newly imprisoned Catholics, witn