Windsor Castle

First, the castle was made of wood on top of a mound of earth.

Later, builders made it from strong stone. Then artists and carvers made the rooms inside beautiful.

The first castle was a mound of earth with a wooden fence, called a stockade, around it. Henry II replaced the wood with stone, building the great Round Tower on top of the mound.

Centuries later, Charles II hired the architect Hugh May, the painter Antonio Verrio and the wood-carver Grinling Gibbons to make splendid new rooms, and he laid out a straight avenue 5 kilometers long called the Long Walk. In the 1820s, George IV's architect Jeffry Wyatville added battlements, turrets and towers in the Gothic style.

The sequence is legible in the fabric. William's mound and stockade (about 1070) were replaced by Henry II's stone Round Tower and walls; in the 13th century Henry III completed the south wall and the west end of the lower ward. Edward III converted the upper ward's fortress buildings into royal apartments (Britannica), and St George's Chapel, begun by Edward IV and finished in 1528, is among the finest examples of Perpendicular Gothic.

Charles II's State Apartments of the 1670s combined Hugh May's architecture, Antonio Verrio's murals and ceilings and Grinling Gibbons's carving; the King's Dining Room and the Queen's Presence and Audience Chambers keep many of these features. He also laid out the 5 km Long Walk due south into Windsor Great Park. George IV and Wyatville added crenellations, turrets and towers in the 1820s, moved the private apartments to the south and east sides of the quadrangle and made the north side for formal occasions.

In 1992, a big fire burned part of the castle.

Workers spent five years fixing it. They used old skills to make it beautiful again. Now visitors come all year round.

On November 20, 1992, a spotlight touched a curtain in the castle's private chapel and set it on fire. It took 15 hours to put the fire out. More than 100 rooms, about one-fifth of the castle, were damaged or destroyed.

Restoring them took five years and brought back many old crafts. The work finished on November 20, 1997, six months early. Today the castle is open all year, and the Changing of the Guard takes place in its grounds.

The Royal Household calls the fire of November 20, 1992 the dominant event of the castle's 20th-century history. It began in the Private Chapel when a spotlight ignited a curtain; putting it out took 15 hours and one and a half million gallons of water. Nine principal rooms and over 100 others, some 9,000 square meters or about one-fifth of the castle's area, were damaged or destroyed.

The five-year restoration, which the Household describes as the greatest historic building project undertaken in the country in the 20th century, revived many traditional crafts and was completed on November 20, 1997, six months ahead of schedule, at £37 million, £3 million under budget. Seventy percent of the cost came from opening Buckingham Palace's State Rooms to summer visitors. Today the castle is open all year and remains a working palace.