The Complete Windsor, England Travel Guide: 21 Best Things To Do, Castle And Beyond

What is there to do in Windsor? The castle, obviously. But a lot of the best of this town sits outside its walls, and plenty of it is free. On most Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, a band marches the new guard straight down the high street, a few feet from the pavement. Out in the Royal Park, there's a hundred-foot totem pole and a Roman ruin shipped over from Libya. But the castle shuts two days a week, and the guard only marches three. So the day you pick Here are 21 things to do, castle and beyond. Number one is the guard, and you don't need a ticket for it. The new guard leaves Victoria Barracks on High Street at about a quarter to eleven, marches up through the town behind the band, and changes over inside the castle's lower ward at eleven. You only need a castle ticket to watch that last part. I'd take a spot on the High Street pavement early instead, where you're close enough to see faces under the bearskins. In London, you'd be watching the same thing through railings from the back of a crowd. The army sets the days, and they do move around, and rain can send the band home, so look up the schedule the week you go. Then hang around, because at about twenty-five past eleven, the old guard marches back down the same way. Number two leaves from the back of the castle. The Long Walk starts at the George IV Gate and runs between two lines of trees, straight as a ruler, laid out by Charles II in the 1680s. Give it two to three hours there and back, and keep an eye out for the red deer in the deer park on either side, about 500 of them. At the far end, up on Snow Hill, George III sits on horseback on a pile of rough granite. Everyone calls the statue the Copper Horse, and it's gone completely green. But the reason to make the walk is what's behind you at the top. Turn around by the statue and the whole avenue runs straight back to the castle, and that's That's a view I'd walk five miles for. On the way down, the Two Brewers on Park Street is a tiny 17th century pub with nine tables inside, so book ahead. Walk back down the avenue and the castle gets bigger the whole way. Number three is the One Big Ticket in Windsor. William the Conqueror started this place around 1070 and it's still a working royal home, the biggest lived-in castle anywhere, which is why it shuts to visitors every Tuesday and Wednesday and on the odd day it's needed. Before you go in. Look up at the Round Tower. The royal standard flying up there means the king is in residence, and the union flag means he's away. Now put the days side by side. The guard marches Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and the castle opens Thursday to Monday, so Thursday and Saturday are the only days you get both, and I'd build the trip around one of them. Inside, you walk the state apartments with no photography allowed, plus the semi-state State Rooms in winter. Or the Venus Garden on the East Terrace in summer, all on the same ticket. Queen Mary's Doll's House has been shut for improvement works, so check it's open if it's the reason you're coming. And save some energy for the bottom of the hill. That's where you'll find number four, St. George's Chapel, down in the lower ward on the same ticket. It's closed to visitors on Sundays for services, and it's the part of the castle I'd plan the whole day around. Look up as you walk in. The ceiling is fan-vaulted stone, and over the carved wooden stalls in the choir hang the bright banners of the Knights of the Garter. Ten kings are buried in this building. Henry VIII lies here with Jane Seymour. And Charles I was brought in after his execution with almost no ceremony at all. It's usually calmer in here than in the State Apartments, and in a small side chapel off the North Isle, the King George VI Memorial Chapel, Queen Elizabeth II lies next to her parents and Prince Philip. That's the hill. At the bottom of it is the river. And number five is the easy way onto it, a 40-minute boat From the promenade up to Boveny Lock and back with a commentary. Take the first sailing of the morning before the day trippers arrive and sit at the back because the castle is behind you as you pull away and you lose it on the way home. You'll slide under Brunel's Iron Railway Bridge from 1849 and past a race course laid out like a figure eight, which I'll come back to. With kids in tow, the Duck Tour is the louder choice, an amphibious bus that drives around town for a while and then drives straight into the river. It takes about an hour, splash included. Up to here you can do everything on foot from the station. Later on there's Runnymede, where you can sit in a ring of bronze chairs in the Magna Carta Meadow, and that one is a lot easier with a driver than with the train. Down in the description you'll find a handful of tour operators who'll handle the driving, and a guide to stretching your travel money further. From the promenade it's a short walk to Windsor Bridge and Number 6. The bridge is iron on granite piers, from 1824 and no car has crossed it since 1970 when cracks turned up in the ironwork so you can stand in the middle with the castle behind you and no traffic at all. Over the far side is Eton. The high street there is quieter than anything in Windsor and it runs up to Eton College founded by Henry VI in 1440 which has turned out 20 prime ministers. You can't just wander in and the heritage tours pause in years when there's building work So look before you plan on one. The college museums do open to the public, free, on Sunday afternoons. From the street, though, you'll catch the pale stone pinnacles of the chapel through the trees and between the buildings. And I liked the Eton side more than I expected to. Carry on upstream from there and number seven is the slow version of that boat ride. The Thames Path runs past the college playing fields toward Bubbney Lock and out in the open meadow stands the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, a tiny flint church with a wooden bell turret and not another building near it. A short way inland is Dorney Court, a Tudor manor the same family still lives in, open to visitors on June afternoons and a few bank holiday Mondays. I'd walk out here on a quiet morning for that little chapel alone. Remember the figure-eight racecourse from the boat? That's number eight, and the way to do it is a Monday night. Royal Windsor runs evening racing on Mondays through the season, on one of only two figure-of-eight courses in the country, laid out on a bend of the Thames. On race days, a riverboat runs from the promenade to the course. There's a second racecourse later on, but for a first night at the races, I'd pick this one. Because you get there by water, back over the bridge, into the town under the walls, there's one building everybody photographs, and it's number nine. The crooked house sits right beside the guild hall, three narrow floors leaning and bowing out of true. The local version of how it got that way is that the council knocked down the original to make room for the guild hall, lost the fight over who owned the land, and had to rebuild it in a hurry with green oak that warped as it dried. It's been a butcher's, a brewery, a tea room, a jeweler, and a bar, and there's a legend of a tunnel from the cellar up to the castle that nobody has ever found. Go inside and you can barely tell it leans, so take your photo from across the street. Right next door is number 10. The Guildhall went up in the late 1680s, brick on top of an open arcade of columns where the corn traders used to meet, and Charles and Camilla had their civil wedding inside in 2005. Stand under the arcade and look at the inner columns. People in Windsor will tell you the councillors didn't trust the open design and demanded extra columns, so the builder, supposedly Christopher Wren, set them just short of the ceiling to make a point. There's not much evidence Wren had anything to do with it, but the gap is there for you to see. Inside, the town museum keeps a mammoth tusk, about a hundred thousand years old, and a model of the Hawker Hurricane. The fighter designed by Windsor-born Sidney Cam, across the high street, almost opposite Castle Hill, is where you probably got off the train, and it's my 11th pick. Windsor and Eton Central was rebuilt in 1897 for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. It still has the long iron and glass canopy, and under it sits a full-size replica of the engine that pulled her royal train, which was given the name The Queen that same year. The room by the platform, they'll tell you, was her private waiting room. From London you come in from Paddington with a change at Slough, which rhymes with cow, in about 35 minutes, or on a slower direct train from Waterloo into Windsor and Eton Riverside, and under the railway arches next door, two flints brews beer while the trains rumble overhead. Out the front of the station, the town is small enough to walk in an afternoon, and that walk is number 12. Queen Victoria's statue, put up for her Golden Jubilee, is at the bottom of Castle Hill. Pescud Street, the main shopping street, got its name from the fields where peas were grown in the Middle Ages. Further up the high street, the parish church of St. John the Baptist has a 17th century painting of the Last Supper up in its west gallery. It's attributed to Francis Kline, and it was in St. George's Chapel until George III gave it to the parish. And at the corner of St. Albans Street. There's a postbox painted blue instead of red, one of the very few left. The notices on it remember September 1911, when mail was flown from Hendon to Windsor in about 15 minutes, the first airmail service in Britain. Of everything on that walk, the postbox is the one I'd make a point of finding. For number 13, I'd eat off the high street, because a lot of what's on it is change you've seen a hundred times. My pick for dinner is Al Fassia on St. Leonard's Road. A Moroccan place, whose recipes go back to the family's original restaurant in Marrakech, order it to Zine. Gurkha Royale, out in Clure a short ride from the center, does Nepalese food, and the steamed lamb momos are the thing to get. Fortescue's on Church Street covers the afternoon with gelato and coffee. And for a pint, the Windsor & Eaton Brewery has a taproom on Duke Street, and in 2018 it got a Royal Warrant as Brewer to Queen Elizabeth. After dinner, number 14 is a few minutes down Thames Street. The Theatre Royal has stood on that spot since 1910, after the theatre before it burned down, and it puts on touring plays, new work, and a pantomime at Christmas. In late September, there's the Windsor Festival, which Yehudi Menuhin and the Dean of Windsor started in 1969 with concerts in places like the Chapel and the State Apartments. That's the one way I know to hear music inside the castle. Leave a like if this has already changed which day you're coming and then let's get out of town. From here on you need a car or good legs. The parks come first and number 15 is where I'd go if you only have time for one of them. Virginia Water is the lake at the far south end of Windsor Great Park, about four and a half miles around, and the walk takes you past the two things I mentioned at the start. One is the totem pole, about 100 feet tall and painted, a gift from From British Columbia in 1958. For the province's 100th anniversary. The other is a set of real Roman columns brought over from Leptis Magna in Libya about 200 years ago and stood up in the trees as a ruin. Neither one has any business being in an English park, and that's exactly why I'd go. For garden people, number 16 is the Savile Garden, at the same end of the park and with a ticket. It's 35 acres, started for King George V in the 1930s, with a big glass house, and a modern rose garden. Keen gardeners can lose half a day here. Everyone else, I'd put that time into the lake. Frogmore House almost never opens, and number 17 is on here, so you don't waste a morning on it. It sits in the private home park just south of the castle, and the house and its garden open on only a handful of charity days a year. The mausoleum where Queen Victoria and Prince Albert lie has been closed since 2007 for restoration. Land in Windsor on one of those open days and it's worth grabbing a ticket. Any other day, give it a miss. Further out, just southwest of town, number 18 is Legoland, Windsor, the first Legoland built outside Denmark, on the site of the old Windsor Safari Park. Kids will put it at the top of everything here. Go in term time if you can, because the summer school holidays are when it's most packed. Ascot is about six miles from the castle, and number 19 is that second racecourse. It's there because Queen Anne rode out from Windsor in 1711 Found open heath and decided it was made for racing. Royal Ascot in June is the week with the carriage procession and the hats. The rest of the year it runs ordinary race days with a lot less dressing up, and those are the days I'd go. Up the river toward Maidenhead, number 20 is a small village with a ridiculous amount of serious cooking in it. Bray has the Waterside Inn, three Michelin stars every year since 1985. The only restaurant outside France to hold them that long. With its terrace right on the riverbank, and Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck is in the same village, neither one is cheap. I'd save the one splurge meal of the trip for here. The one I'd finish on is downstream, about 15 minutes by car. Number 21 is Runnymede, the meadows where King John sealed Magna Carta in 1215, National Trust Land, and Free to Walk. There's a small domed memorial on columns, put up in 1957 by the American Bar Association. And up the hill the Kennedy Memorial sits on an acre given to the United States, reached by 50 granite steps, one for each state. The Queen and Jacqueline Kennedy opened it together in 1965. The piece I like best is the newest. The jurors went in for Magna Carta's 800th anniversary in 2015, 12 bronze chairs set in a ring in the meadow with pictures cast into their backs. And you're meant to sit in them. Across the river at Anchorwick, there's a yew so old that nobody agrees on its age, with guesses in the thousands of years, and Henry VIII is said to have courted Anne Boleyn under it. Windsor works as a day trip, and on the train from London, it's barely more than half an hour. But I'd give it a night. Make the first day a Thursday or a Saturday so the guard and the castle line up, finish it on the long walk in the late afternoon, and keep the second day for the river Eton and those chairs at Runnymede. Two days with a night in between is how I do Windsor.