Known for
The working royal residence of Windsor Castle above the River Thames
Must-see landmarks
Windsor Castle, St George's Chapel and Eton College
Free to visit
Windsor Great Park and the Long Walk, plus the Windsor Parish Church
Days needed
A single day covers the castle and Eton at an easy pace
Christopher Wren built this High Street guildhall in 1686, its facade held up by pillars the town's burgesses insisted on; certain they were unnecessary, Wren added them anyway and left a visible gap between two and the beam above. Its ground floor houses the Windsor & Royal Borough Museum. Windsor Castle's gatehouse is a short walk downhill.
Still a working royal residence, Windsor Castle calls itself the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world, begun by William the Conqueror in the 11th century. It closes to visitors on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and photography is not allowed inside the State Apartments or the chapel. St George's Chapel is a couple of minutes away.
Ten kings are buried inside this chapel, among them Henry VIII and Charles I, and it is not part of the general visit on Sundays, when it opens only for worship. Evensong is free to attend most evenings, a 45-minute choral service at 17:15. The path south from the castle leads to the start of the Long Walk in 7 minutes.
Charles II laid out this three-mile avenue running dead straight south from the castle gate into Windsor Great Park, its far end marked by a distant statue known as the Copper Horse. It is free to walk at any time, and bicycles are banned even to be pushed along it. Windsor Bridge and the riverside are a 10 minute walk back down through the town.
Windsor Bridge has crossed the Thames since 1824 and now carries only foot and cycle traffic, its promenade on the Windsor side opening up views back at the castle walls above the water. Boat trips leave from the riverside here for stretches of the Thames. Eton's High Street starts on the far bank, just a minute across the bridge.
Shops and old coaching inns line Eton's High Street, running past Eton College's brick buildings towards the water meadows. School Yard and the College Chapel, begun in 1441 in the Perpendicular Gothic style, are visible from the street; the college's own tours are paused through 2026, but its three small museums open free on Sunday afternoons.
Charles II laid out this straight, tree lined avenue between the castle gate and Snow Hill, and the climb ends at the Copper Horse, an equestrian statue of George III raised in 1831. The walk crosses the Deer Park, home to a herd of red deer and to some of the oldest oaks in northern Europe. The view back down the avenue, with the castle closing the horizon, is the one most people come for.
Heritage: Grade I listed park and garden
Location: Windsor Great Park, between the castle gate and Snow Hill
Access: Free. The park is open all year and free to enter, though parking is charged, and cycles, scooters and skateboards are not allowed on the Long Walk or in the Deer Park, even pushed. Windsor Great Park posts visitor updates when the Deer Park has to close.
William the Conqueror founded the castle in the 11th century and 40 monarchs have lived here since, which is why the Royal Collection Trust describes it as the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world. A visit takes in the State Apartments, Queen Mary's Dolls' House and the precincts, and the trust suggests allowing an hour and a half to two hours for it. Seen from Thames Street below, the curtain wall runs along to the Curfew Tower, which holds the bells of St George's Chapel.
Style: Perpendicular Gothic
Location: Castle Hill, Windsor
Access: Ticketed, with visitors admitted Thursday to Monday. Changing the Guard costs nothing to watch from the street and takes place at 11:00 on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
The Guildhall stands on the High Street where the medieval market once spread, its ground floor left open behind Portland stone columns and its upper storey carrying statues of Queen Anne and her consort Prince George of Denmark in niches on the north and south fronts. The building was extended two bays eastwards in 1829. Windsor Guildhall Museum now fills the ground floor, with a collection running from a mammoth tusk around 100,000 years old to a model of the Hawker Hurricane, designed by Windsor born Sydney Camm.
Heritage: Grade I listed
Location: The Guildhall, High Street, Windsor SL4 1LR
Access: The facade costs nothing to look at. The museum opens Mondays and Tuesdays from 10:00 to 16:00 and Sundays from 11:00 to 14:00, times kept by the Royal Borough.
Photo: "The Windsor Guildhall" by Diego Delso (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A very large Victorian Gothic mansion in landscaped grounds on the bank of the Thames, dated 1859 and listed since 1977. It is built of buff brick with Portland and Bath stone dressings under a fishscale tile roof with ridge cresting, and a castellated tower rises above the south east front between crow stepped gables whose pinnacles carry heraldic beasts. The house stands a few miles upstream from Windsor, in the parish of Bray, and works today as a hotel and conference centre in 35 acres of grounds running down to the water.
Style: Victorian Gothic
Heritage: Grade II* listed
Location: Windsor Road, Water Oakley, Bray SL4 5UR
Access: Privately run, with bedrooms, restaurants and event spaces rather than a visitor route.
The chapel of the Order of the Garter sits in the Lower Ward of the castle, a late medieval building whose west front is filled by an enormous traceried window. Pilgrims once crowded into it to reach the tomb of Henry VI, a king widely held to be a saint, and his shrine was venerated until Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1536. The Curfew Tower nearby carries the chapel bells in a timber frame first planned as a spire that was never built.
Style: Gothic
Heritage: Grade I listed
Location: Lower Ward, Windsor Castle
Access: Ticketed as part of a Windsor Castle visit, on Mondays and Thursdays to Saturdays from 10:00 to 16:00, and closed to sightseers on Sundays. Services are free and need no ticket, and evensong is sung at 17:15.
Eton's High Street runs from the far end of Windsor Bridge past brick houses, antique shops and old inns towards the college and the water meadows. Royal processions between Westminster and Windsor came along this road, among them the funeral of Jane Seymour in 1537. Near numbers 47 to 49 stands a pillar box of 1856 by Smith and Hawkes of Birmingham, one of only ten to survive, with a vertical posting slot and fluted Doric decoration. Eton was the first village in England to have a post office.
Location: Eton High Street, Eton, across Windsor Bridge
Access: Free. A public street, open at any hour, about a minute on foot from the Windsor bank.
Photo: "Eton High Street, near Windsor" by Steve Daniels (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Henry VI founded the school in 1440 and its brick ranges are among the earliest brick buildings in the country, grouped around School Yard with the College Chapel along one side. The chapel keeps late 15th century wall paintings, rediscovered in the 19th century, and twenty British prime ministers were educated here. Barnes Pool Bridge, recorded from the 13th century and remade in iron in the 19th, crosses just before the college gates.
Heritage: Grade I listed
Location: Eton College, Eton, across the bridge from Windsor
Access: There is no Heritage Tours programme in 2026. The museums and gallery open free on Sunday afternoons from 13:30 to 16:00, with the Museum of Eton Life shut from May to November 2026 for building work, as College Collections sets out.
An iron bridge makes the short crossing between Windsor and Eton, replacing a line of timber bridges that reaches back to about 1170, when a bridge was still a rare and costly thing to own. It brought trade to Windsor's market and underpinned the new town's economy, and river and road tolls were collected here into the 19th century, claimed by the Crown until the 16th, when the bridge passed to the town. The promenade on the Windsor side looks back at the castle walls above the water, while the open grass of Brocas Meadows faces the towers head on from the Eton bank.
Location: Thames Street and River Street, Windsor
Access: Free, and open at any time of day.
Legoland Windsor - Daily Entry is standard one-day admission to the Lego-themed park south of the town, on sale for any date through 31 December 2026.
Kevin Bloody Wilson: Fair Dinkum Funny plays The Beck Theatre in Hayes on 15 October at 19:30, a stand-up comedy show.
Alasdair Beckett-King: King of Crumbs plays Norden Farm Centre in Maidenhead on 12 November at 19:45, a comedy show.
Nick Heyward: The 12 Dates of Christmas plays Holy Trinity Church in Cookham, near Maidenhead, on 27 November at 18:45.
St John the Baptist, the parish church beside the Guildhall, is usually open every day and free to step inside. The current building marked its 200th anniversary in 2022, and among its features is a 17th-century painting of the Last Supper.
This stretch of open grassland on the Eton side of the river has no gate, no ticket booth and no closing time, just grazing land that happens to face the towers and battlements of the castle head on.
The oldest tree in the National Trust's care, thought to have stood for 2,500 years beside the ruins of a Benedictine nunnery.
Location: Ankerwycke, across the Thames from Runnymede, Wraysbury TW19 5AF. Parking is limited, as the National Trust warns.
Mute swans on the Thames have been royal birds since about 1189. Each July the Crown, Vintners and Dyers count and mark the cygnets.
Location: Windsor Promenade, Barry Avenue, Windsor SL4 1QX. The Dyers' Company explains the census.
One of the shortest streets in Britain at 51 feet and 10 inches, tucked off the High Street beside the leaning Market Cross House.
Location: Queen Charlotte Street, off Windsor High Street
A full size replica of the engine that carried Queen Victoria to London on Diamond Jubilee day in 1897, standing inside the station arcade.
Location: Windsor Royal, Windsor and Eton Central station, Thames Street
A seven tonne block of Portland stone by Geoffrey Jellicoe, set in an acre of ground given to the United States in 1965.
Location: Runnymede, Windsor Road, near Old Windsor
A working clock sunk into the paving of Thames Street, reinstated in 2011 above a time capsule, on the spot of a 1950 original.
Location: Thames Street, Windsor, outside the former Dyson and Sons jewellers
Windsor is a small Berkshire town of around 32,000 people on the River Thames, a short train ride west of London, and almost everything in it points back to the castle on the hill at its centre. Eton, its twin across a pedestrian bridge, adds one of England's best-known schools to the same afternoon.
Windsor Castle has been a working royal residence for close to a thousand years, and the town grew up to serve it: the High Street runs straight to the castle gate, Victoria Barracks houses the soldiers who march the Changing of the Guard, and the royal standard flying from the Round Tower still tells residents when the King is in.
Windsor Bridge, pedestrian only, is the short link to Eton, a quieter town built around Eton College. Its High Street of shops and old inns runs past the school's brick buildings and water meadows, and the college's small museums open to anyone on Sunday afternoons even when its Heritage Tours are not running.
A single day covers the castle, the chapel and a walk across to Eton, and works as a half-day trip from London for anyone short on time. A second day leaves room for Windsor Great Park and the Long Walk, and it is worth checking which day of the week the castle is open before travelling. The Great Park drew more visitors in 2025 than any other attraction outside London, which puts it near the top of the top attractions in the United Kingdom.
Windsor's centre is flat and walkable, with both railway stations close to the castle and Eton reachable on foot across the pedestrian bridge. It also works as a short add-on to a London stay, and travellers splitting time between the two often pair it with the Tower of London, founded by the same 11th century king, or with Kensington Palace, another royal residence open to visitors.